Barf & Beans

I see dead things. Where others see a pile of leaves, some flattened garbage - I see the truth. Little sticks become bones under my attentive gaze, fly away scraps of fabric become fluffy tails. While the rest of the world walks serenely down sidewalks and streets, through parks and by houses I walk through the world seeing every single dead squirrel, mouse or bird that has ever been run over, chewed on or pushed out of its nest.
My husband has started to call me the grim reaper. As if the very act of noticing the fluffy dead implies some sort of prior involvement in their demise. I believe that this title is part of a secret campaign he has begun. A campaign of typecasting that all husbands and wives engage in at one time or another. In the yin-yang of marriage and partnerships extreme opposites are required to maintain the appearance of balance in the universe. By assigning me the name grim reaper he automatically becomes an angel of mercy. I’m cynic to his clown, I’m spicy to his sweet, I’m darkness to his bright light, and I am a pessimist in the face of his eternal optimism. In my heart, I know I can be the sweet and cuddly one. I could break from type and play the clown. I could overcome my husband’s negative branding campaign of my persona and capture the rosy spotlight for myself. I could if it weren’t for the fact that I also seem to encounter an alarming amount of vomit…
My husband has yet to come up with an appropriate title to mock my backward super hero like ability to spot vomit on sidewalks, in bus shelters on grass and gravel. He uses the grim reaper as a catch-all term to encompass this special gift. We live in mid-town by some small pubs and bars, houses and apartments, nothing out of the ordinary and yet I often come across piles of vomit in my walks through the neighbourhood. I never fail to point them out to my husband so that he can share in my disgust in these multi-coloured, multi-textures piles of goop. He shares in my disgust while taking the opportunity to underscore what an aura of darkness I must have around me to put me in contact with all of this liquid human misery. Again it’s as if the very act of noticing the mess implies I had some sort of psychic hand in its creation. It doesn’t help that the fluffy dead and/or the piles of vomit seem to appear before me on days that I feel particularly blue or cynical which only serves to contribute to my husbands spin on my role as Darth Vader to his badly coiffed Luke.
One day my husband and I were on our way to see my father in the hospital where he was recovering from triple by-pass surgery. It was a both a blue day and a cynical day, it was a day where I had no hope or aspirations of breaking from my negative relationship typecasting. A day that I was just hoping to get through in one piece, a day that was destined, it seemed, to involve something dead or gross piled up at my feet. While walking down the street on the way to the hospital my super senses lead me to a particularly aggressive pile of vomit. Both my husband and I were horrified, although he was not so horrified that he couldn’t point to me and cry out that I am in fact some sort of purveyor of death doom and destruction. Evidently, in the husband and wife campaign for optimistic supremacy there are no days off.
As we continued to walk down the street, me under a grey cloud and him happily gliding along in a shaft of sunlight reserved for the optimists of this world, my husband stopped suddenly. Something on the miserable slush filled ground had caught his eye. In a happy high-pitched, let’s just call it girlish, voice my husband said ‘oh- look…Jellybeans!’ On a street full of brown half melted slush sat a pristine white pile of snow sprinkled with jellybeans. Jellybeans that were every colour of the rainbow, jellybeans that sparkled like jewels against the snow, jellybeans that had the perfectly scattered appearance of some magical seeds that had been sprinkled on the ground by tiny perfect fairies. As we stood together gazing at the lovely candy mosaic before us I realized that I had been beaten. In our mutual campaign to define ourselves in the best possible light and each other in lesser supporting roles my husband had triumphed. For now and forever more I will be reminded that as he and I walk through the world hand and hand all I see is barf while he sees shinny happy beans.