sweet t:

So after talking all that smack about Elphie, I’ve dumped him in my office, on top of an old file cabinet where there’s no natural sunlight (the office is purple, by the way, formerly inhabited by the equivalent of a writing rock star (she was on the Cobert Report, need I say more?) so I find myself touching things in her old desk, looking for clues to her literary success, but finding no more than a blackberry charger, a few bent paperclips, a broken desk pull complete with screws, and a business card for a marketing firm in NY..).  I’m not sure what all this means, but I’ve decided to hold onto the business card.  Back to Elphie.  I did find him a friend, a grey elephant teapot from Pier One, which I will fill with water and use as a vase.  I also bought an elephant pillow (to be fair, it features monkeys and viney-things too..).   I could look into the symbolism of elephants and see what’s going on a level so deep I don’t even have access to it, or I can simply tell myself that I have to furnish an empty house; that I’m trying to make a home of a new place.  Speaking of which, I will miss the smokers and lobby-congregators at the Extended Stay—there’s a whole culture of extended stayers; all tired around the eyes and wrinkled (though the Extended Stay does supply irons..) all ordering Chinese takeout and stretching their legs as they chat up the newly admitted and try to nab anyone who walks by -‘you there, with the new york plates’ so they can tell their stories of divorce, new jobs, and mainly, of waiting for something to come to them to make it so they can leave.  I asked the woman at the desk what’s the longest anyone has stayed the Extended Stay, and she raised her brows, ’about as long as we’ve been open’—well, how long is that, I say.  Five years, give or take. 

But not me.  And my elephants.  We’re out of here.