“Don’t cry over spilt milk.” She decreed
dabbing gingerly at the dribble and tears that covered my face.
I nodded.
I learned it was no use to cry over spilt milk,
so I didn’t.
I didn’t even sniffle when the milk dripped down from my overturned, chipped
blue cookie monster mug and collected in a pool of pearly froth on the
linoleum, yellow floors.
When it babbled merrily down to the wooden door
I didn’t bat an eyelash because
I learned that it could be wiped up in an instant with a ratty, old
flowered towel.
When it sneakily seeped through the door and spilled out into the streets,
filling the potholes and crevices, and washing away the obnoxiously vibrant street flyers
I didn’t shed one tear,
because I knew that she’d be there in her cotton sweater and slippers,
smelling of an Eau De Parfum tester she’d saved from a magazine,
puttering softly over to the worn, paint stained kitchen table to slide
   a new glass and cookie  leaving me with a lipstick stain imprinted on my left cheek.
However some glasses of milk are larger than others and you can only fiddle with a glass for so long before it tips, succumbing to one’s fumbling fingers.
So when the spilt milk floods our town and people come
scowling, accusing, humiliating me
asking me to fix this roiling sea of spilt milk,
and she stands here with her simpering smile offering me that ratty old towel,  a cookie, and a sticky kiss on the cheek,
I sobbed.
I sobbed because cookies weren’t substantial to float on, and a ratty towel wouldn’t wipe up the spilt milk and even a kiss on the cheek wouldn’t magically make it all evaporate into those puffy, chalky-white clouds I used to pretend looked like animals.
And most of all I sobbed because I realized that this whole world is a puddle of spilt milk,
and we are all left to flounder in it, using cookie monster mugs to try and bail ourselves out.