It’s Saturday afternoon, and you’ve got zero plans beyond the couch, a two-day-old pizza in the fridge, and a few episodes of your favorite show. You’ve dressed accordingly: old sweatpants and a favorite t-shirt you’ve worn so long it has holes in it. Your hair is doing whatever it’s been doing since you woke up this morning.
Then the phone rings. New plan. You’re having company. They’ll be here in an hour. This is the first you’re hearing of it.
Within about ten seconds, your afternoon has just done a full 180. You’re moving faster now than you’ve moved all week. And the pizza box that didn’t bother you at all two hours ago suddenly needs to disappear, and fast.
In the kitchen, you notice the pile of dishes sitting on the counter and the stack of mail that’s been accumulating for the past two weeks. All that needs to go too.
You throw the dishes in the dishwasher and grab the garbage. On your way to take it out you catch a glimpse of yourself in the hallway mirror. You decide the hair situation is gonna need some help too.
None of this seemed to matter before you knew anyone was coming over. You walked right past every single one of these things earlier today and barely even noticed them. Now you’re circling the place like it’s going to be inspected, which, in a sense, it’s about to be.
You briefly wonder why unexpected company always seems to show up at the worst possible time, until you realize there probably isn’t a good one.
The minute someone is coming over, a switch flips, and it’s not a dimmer. It’s on or off. You don’t scale the cleanup to the stakes. You just clean, on instinct, the moment there’s about to be an outside witness.
You spend a good chunk of the time you have left making the things you use all the time look like you don’t use them. You fold the throws and fluff the couch pillows, straighten the chairs, tidy the loose cords, line the remotes up neatly on the coffee table.
Then you light a candle you forgot you had and hope it does whatever your mom always said it was supposed to do, though at the moment you can’t quite remember what that was.
Twenty minutes left, and you’ve got a decision to make between a shower and a dusty shelf. The shelf loses. You head for the shower. Afterwards you throw on some clean clothes, comb your hair, and do one more pass through the room.
A pillow gets straightened again. A mug you missed goes in the sink. A picture frame is nudged back into place.
You hear their car pull up outside.
They knock once and then again. You open the door slightly out of breath, hair still damp. “Good to see you. I hope I didn’t keep you waiting.”
They compliment the candle. “Thanks,” you say. “Don’t you just love the smell of jasmine?” Like you burn candles every day and this is just how all your Saturdays go.
You get them settled in the living room, pour some drinks, and everyone starts talking. But somewhere in conversation, your eyes start to wander discreetly. A smudge on the TV screen catches your attention. A few crumbs you missed are scattered near the bottom of the couch. A pillow you fluffed earlier is already leaning again.
Of course they don’t see any of it. They just see a candle that smells like jasmine and a room that looks effortlessly clean. And as far as they know, that’s just how you always live.
A couple hours later, they leave. The door has barely clicked shut before your shoulders drop and the whole room starts sliding back to how it was before.
The candle gets blown out. The pillow gets un-fluffed by nothing more than you sitting back down on it. You reach for a remote, and the neat little line is already gone.
The leftover pizza’s back on the coffee table before the opening credits are even over.
By the time your show comes back on, the place looks almost exactly like it did before the phone rang today. You didn’t decide to undo it. You just did it naturally, the second there was nobody left to watch you do it.