Herringbone Floor

The slats on the floor of our apartment are part of the reason we chose it. It’s called herringbone and the pattern is one that I now connote with Budapest. I hadn’t seen it before visiting here in 2018, and I immediately knew then that I wanted an apartment with it.

The thing about this flooring is that it’s not very practical in today’s world. It’s the creakiest flooring I’ve ever had, and we’re on the 2nd floor so our poor downstairs neighbours hear all the midnight toilet trips and my child excitedly running through the apartment at 6 am on a Saturday (why God why). And when I first moved in I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to keep these floors clean. I was literally hot mopping every second day wondering why my socks were still turning black. It took me three months to connect that to why Hungarians keep a collection of hard-bottomed slippers at the front door. So now I wear slippers inside permanently and I only mop once a month.

The other inconvenience to this flooring is that the older the floor, the more likely gaps are opening up between the slats. And our floor is quite old. Sometimes when I’m sweeping, a giant collection of dust is building until I get to one particularly large slat hole which seems to eat all the dust into oblivion underneath. I call this slat hole my friendly neighborhood sandworm and just start pounding the floor when I need something to disappear.

I know altogether far too much about these slats because I’ve seen them up close much more than I would like to admit. It turns out I’m the dramatic type, and when things get too much for me, I find myself on the floor. These slatted floors have caught far too many tears, and now there’s one particularly noticeable slat that is pulling up a little, probably from the uneven collection of moisture. It’ll be a worthy hole for another sandworm soon.

I wonder how many tears these floors have seen.

There’s a real random verse in the Bible about how God collects our tears, and how he records each one in his little book. And isn’t it just like me to worry about the allocation of these tears? Like the notes allocating my tears to purely selfless motivations is probably a little scribble in one page in the corner, while pages and pages are scribbled in from margin to margin on account of the self-pitying collection. This will probably lead to a friendly chat with my neighbourhood God about why I need to be shedding my tears for more selfless manners.

Luckily, I have the unassuaged belief that God doesn’t work that way. Yes, God is watching me as I lie on my beautifully designed herringbone floor. In my loneliest state, he sees me and is collecting those tears. Probably best they don’t stay on the hardwood floor, they’re likely to warp something. But no, his intent is not to judge. It is to know.

And it’s ok, I think, to spend a few precious tears on yourself. It’s ok to do it dramatically on the floor, to show just how low things have physically gotten. God sees that too. I know it starts as a selfish thing, but I do end up talking to him. There is nothing like a bit of physical expression to show a god just how things are feeling as a mere mortal. Like, I know Jesus is human and all that, but I can’t picture him in the fetal position on the floor. Oh yeah, he kinda did that in Gethsemane when he was about to die in the most inhumane way. I haven’t gotten to the sweating blood type of stress yet, so there’s that consolation.

Maybe his genuine trauma tear jar is fuller than mine.

I might go back to mopping every second day.