Things We Stop Seeing

I woke up and looked straight up—

the light coming through the slats,

the fan blade, the dust.

Not dust like a speck. Dust like a film,

a gray coat of itself, thick enough

to catch the sun in a specific way,

to show me the shape of what I've been ignoring.

How long has that been there?

Weeks? Months? A year?

I must have looked at that blade a thousand times,

my eyes passing over it like it wasn't there,

like dust was just the natural state

of something that spins.

The dust has a pattern—

swirls where the air moved it,

bare spots where I must have once cleaned it,

though I can't remember when.

It's beautiful and terrible,

the way neglect is. The way you can live

with something for so long that you stop

actually seeing it.

I don't get up to clean it.

I just lie there, looking up,

understanding suddenly that there are probably

a hundred things I pass every day

that have gone gray like this,

that I've chosen not to notice.

The dust stays.

I keep looking.