My kitchen is in serious need of cleaning. As is my bathroom, and to be honest, my bedroom and living room as well. Which is to say, my whole apartment could use a serious scrubbing. And, normally, I’d be happy to get down to business, Windex and Scrubbing Bubbles in hand. I actually kind of enjoy cleaning, find it oddly soothing, almost therapeutic. While most of the other things I accomplish day to day are nebulous achievements, at best small, cumulative steps, in cleaning, with less than one day’s work, I can make dramatic progress, achieve impressive results, even finish the job completely.

The problem, though, is that I only live here for another month. Come December first, I’ll have brought everything I own to a new (and presumably pre-cleaned) place some ten blocks West. Plus, I figure, by even mid-November, I’ll have started boxing and wrapping preemptively, my floor by then covered with piles of everything I own. Which basically saps my will to clean. Why put in the effort when I’ll have so little time to appreciate the results?

Of course, with each passing day, the layer of grime coating my stove and bathroom sink thickens. But with each passing day, I’m also that much closer to the move, allowing me to rationalize one step more easily why cleaning just doesn’t make sense.

Sort of like taking a taxi. Say you’re fifteen, twenty blocks from your destination. A long walk or a short taxi ride. And the thing is, if you’re going to take the taxi, you have to commit to it right away. Because if you just start walking, wavering over whether it’s worth hailing a cab, you’re getting closer and closer with each passing step, making the cab ride harder and harder to justify.

If I really wanted to have the place clean, I would have needed to pull out the mop three or four weeks back. By now, it’s just the cockroaches and I in a long, slow slide to when I finally get the hell out.