Monday,
       somewhere around five,
       Mari sent a message from my condo:

       "Um,
        don’t wanna snitch,
        but the condo is a bit,
        umm."

"I hope he cleans it up
   before you get here."

That was it.

No details.

No photographic evidence.

No severity rating.

Just enough information
        to let my brain
          open a ticket

          and spend the entire night escalating it.

Here’s the thing:

I was supposed to be there.

Same day.

Same time.

I was supposed to walk
     through that door
        after Montreal,
           drop my bag,
          scratch Coal,
     and let the whole
         travel circus

    finally power down.

Instead,
        Bonus Lap sent me
        directly to Fort Worth,
        which meant Mari
        had to pick up Mr. C

        without me.

Which meant she saw it.

Like that.

And “like that,”
    as I later learned,
    had a blast radius.

And the hardest part to swallow?

This wasn’t some random kid off an app.

This was a guy I thought was for real.

An Atlanta friend—

   Someone you hand the keys to
          and don't think twice.

Instead, I handed the keys
         to a cokehead on a bender
                 who later told me,
              with his whole chest,

         that he "lost a whole day."

Lost a day.

Like it fell behind the couch cushion.

Like that makes it better.

Every drop of alcohol: gone.

Every towel in the house:

      on the floor,

      for reasons still under investigation.

Hair: everywhere.

Layers of it.

The condo wearing
    an entirely new coat
          I didn’t order.

My brand-new speakers:
              dropped,
              damaged,
 put back upside down.
 (apparently gravity is hard on a bender)

The Smithey pots: rusted.
The Shun knives: rusted.

My bed: stripped.
Washer: full of his shit.
Dryer: also full
                of
                  his
                     shit.

And the dogs?

No water.

God knows for how long.

That's where the jokes stop.
That's where the grace period ends.

For dog’s sake.

You can ruin my pans.
You can drink my bourbon.
You can rearrange my electronics
    like a tweaked-out interior designer.

But don't you mess with the animals.

The rest of it is stuff.

Expensive stuff.
Annoying stuff.

Stuff I have spent
 the whole weekend
 and a few pennies
          cleaning,
           washing,
         scrubbing,
         restoring,
         replacing.

The condo is barely presentable again.

The alcohol cabinet has been repurchased.

The towels have returned
    from whatever terrible meeting
    they were holding on the floor.

The pots and knives are in recovery.

The speakers are upright,
   which should not feel
  like an accomplishment,

         but here we are.

C/D: Condo Destruction.

Incident response
         with laundry detergent,
                     steel wool,
       and the kind of language
               usually reserved
         for production outages

         and very specific airport delays.

Scrubbing someone else's bad decisions
          out of my floorboards
          just so I could welcome company
          into a home that didn't feel

          like a crime scene.

I almost let his lost day
         ruin my real one.

Then,
     because apparently
         the postmortem
         was not complete,

         I opened the freezer.

Handel’s.

Every bit of it.

Gone.

All of it.

Not the worst thing.

Not even close.

Just the final little alert
           after the system
        was already on fire.

The tiny frozen footnote
    that finally made me
         say it out loud:

         What
             the fucking
                        fuck?

(sorry, Mr C)