Episode 9: I started writing the date on the milk because my roommate never once ate and everyone said I was the strange one Titelbild

Episode 9: I started writing the date on the milk because my roommate never once ate and everyone said I was the strange one

Episode 9: I started writing the date on the milk because my roommate never once ate and everyone said I was the strange one

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Submitted by Wes — Lawrence, Kansas. 31. I dated the milk. That is the part that makes people look at me a certain way, so I will just say it first and you can decide from there. When I bought a carton I wrote the day on the cap in Sharpie, and the day I opened it right under that, and I kept the flattened empties in the bin by the door until trash night. I am not a tidy person otherwise. My car is a disgrace. But I have always liked knowing when a thing came into a house and when it left. We were four in that house on Osage Street in Wichita — me, a married couple upstairs, and Denny. Denny had the room off the kitchen, the old dining room, the one with the pocket doors that never quite shut. He had lived there the longest. And he was easy, that is the thing I keep coming back to. He would sit at the table while I cooked and ask about my day and actually listen to the answer. Everyone liked Denny. I liked Denny. I just never once saw him eat. I do not mean he was a picky eater. I mean that in fourteen months I never saw food go into the man. No plate of his in the sink. No wrapper in the trash I could not account for. The couple upstairs ordered in and left their boxes on the stairs. I cooked and washed my one pan. Denny's shelf in the refrigerator held a jar of olives and a bottle of hot sauce and nothing else, and the olives in the spring were the same olives as the winter, at the same level, because after a while I had started writing small dates on his things too, in the corner of the label, the way I did the milk. That is the sentence where I lose people. I know how it sounds. So when I finally said something — lightly, at the table, "Denny, I have genuinely never once seen you eat, what do you live on" — the couple laughed like it was a bit, and later the wife caught me on the porch and asked, in that gentle voice, whether I was doing all right. Whether I was sleeping. She said, you know you write dates on everything, right. You know you count the boxes and the cans. She said it so kindly. She said, Denny is just a light eater, honey, not everybody makes a whole production of it like you and me. And I stood there holding a carton of milk that was two months past the day I had written on its cap, still most of the way full, because I had quietly stopped drinking it around the time I started watching, and I thought: maybe. Maybe I am the one to keep an eye on here. Maybe the person who dates the olives is the strange one in the house, and not the man who has never, in front of me or anyone else, put one single thing in his mouth. I moved that summer. A job across the state, an easy reason to give. I have my own place now, my own refrigerator, one shelf, and I would love to tell you I stopped counting. I write the day on the cap. I write the day I open it. Last week I poured a glass and it turned my stomach and I checked, and I had opened that carton four days before, four days, and I live alone now. No couple upstairs to laugh. No Denny at the table being easy to like. Here is the thing I keep landing on, and it is why I am telling you and not a doctor. They were right that I count. I do count. And the one clean fact my counting ever gave me, in fourteen months on Osage Street, was this: the milk in that house went down faster than one person drinks. Denny never ate. The couple ordered in. I had stopped. And it emptied anyway, a little every night, on its own steady schedule — the way a thing leaves a house when somebody you are not counting is keeping their own count. So do me a favor tonight. Go look at your own carton. Read the date, then look at the level, and tell me who in your house you have simply decided is a light eater.
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