Ouch!

Please don't prod too much or I'll break down and cry and melt down the graters and it'll be the last of me you'll see again until I reconstitute and sit next to you on the bus again, but with more cracks this time.

Love you right

STICKING

WET
SLEPT
SOUR
SOUR
GRATE
MELT
PRESS
LIP
CROON
TEA
SWEPT
MUD
DUD
INCH
LIFT

Slow moving

Sometimes you need to neglect everything in life so as not to neglect yourself, right?

To begin cleaning my room takes considerable strength of the mind. I prepare for it throughout the week. I wake up to a messy room full of complete and utter shit, and repeat the morning mantra: tonight, when I get back home from work, I will clean my room. But I repeat that mantra as I head straight to a friend’s place holding a bottle of wine, and repeat that as I get drunk on aforementioned wine, and then repeat it again as I stumble into bed, too apathetic about my current condition, of the right treatment of the body, basic self-respect, matters of cleanliness, because I could really care less, and besides, I’m going to wash my sheets tomorrow.

But then I get a nagging feeling in my head, from when Kyle told me not brushing your teeth after drinking is the worst damage you could wreck on your dental health. I struggle my way to the bathroom— Bright lights! Cold floors! Moving!-- because I think I’m concerned about my teeth.

But I also know that I would actually just hate to look back at it all when I’m strapped to the operating chair in a few years. My dentist has just numbed my teeth with a large metal needle. It pinched. I’m sweating under the light when he grabs pliers and starts grabbing for a rotted tooth. “You seem nervous,” he says. “Relax.”

“Doctor, I’m fine,” I want to say, “I just sweat like this normally, for example, when I wake up.” He should know that abnormally excessive sweaters exist and that is fine. I flinch when the pliers lock on to my molar.

It’s at this time when I realize that my mouth is not yet completely numb and that after all these years I still don’t really know what my dentist looks like behind his mask.

Most of the things I find in my room are unused vitamins, paper clippings, business cards, posters, flyers, leaflets, individually wrapped bags of tea, deodorant I meant to return, two identical books I meant to return, an uneven Frisbee, heart-patterned wrapping paper, a dirty bowl with a stale chunk of rye bread, unreturned letters. I cannot throw them away, but I know the next time I come back to them I can grab them by fistfuls and leave them in the trash bag. Eventually I understand that I’ve grown weary of them, and that my bullshit has got to stop. Sometimes when I call my mom she'll ask for a picture of the current state of my room, which means she wants my bullshit to stop. No matter what, even if I am having a bad day, I have to stop my bullshit. There is no use dwelling on it. It stinks. 

I killed a plant once. My other plant has grown buds in my friend’s apartment, where it was forgotten about after winter break, and the plants that live in my room back home thrive because my mother waters them everyday while I am in college.

I used to get sharp pains in my foot. I waited three years before telling my doctor.

My favorite Italian ice shop closed down this summer. I have always meant to go there one last time.

I haven’t seen someone important to me in years. I don’t miss them but I love them very much.

But I let things grow old and dirty, because I reason that they’d end up like that regardless. I think I have done very well for myself despite this, but I notice myself more haggard, irritable, withered, brooding in the darker parts of my room where the light doesn't reach. I was told to lean in it. It's quieter there.

Weather

It was raining a lot in Chicago. I can’t really say for sure if this is a big surprise to me, if this strikes me as odd or upsetting, because it feels like I haven’t been here enough to have an opinion on it. Many nights this quarter I stayed up, running on packing anxiety and Ex Lib coffee and once a shot of Ballantine’s, waiting to fly away from Hyde Park in a stale-smelling plane. I had a lot of trouble deciding what jacket I wanted to bring on the plane, because I was conscious of the weather of my destination and the weather here; I wanted to be warm when I got off the plane in Chicago, but I didn’t want to overheat and explode in Miami. It felt very, very wrong, having to decide which jacket so many times.

Sometimes the airport feels a bit too far away from me so I chalk up an excuse to take an Uber. I like taking these Ubers, me in my blonde hair. I know I look young but I like to pretend I’m someone else when I take these Ubers. A creative consultant, a hip analyst. I usually stick to those roles. I know no one cares but I still persist in thinking that someone cares (I care!), so I lavish in playing pretend. In the safety of the back of the sleek car I gain a sense of self-worth and effortlessness that I don’t think I can attain outside of this space.

It was a raining a lot in Chicago, I mostly knew this because I watched my friends’ Snapchats of the rain beating down in Mansueto, or the puddles invading the quad. I watched it twisted up and tired in the cramped seat of the plane that just touched down in New York, I watched it when I couldn’t sleep at night because the bed in the boat just didn’t quite comfort me enough. How was Miami, people ask. It must have been so nice and warm.

It was nice and warm, look at my tan, my skin is soft from the rough saltwater.

I took a bus to Michigan. In a poem she wrote, my friend Michelle called our fellow passengers seaweed people. Their sleeping faces are hazy in my mind.

My favorite part of my trip to UMich was dropping off at the rest stop and seeing all the items for sale. Racetrack uniforms and half pound hot dogs. Butane burners. Michigan keychains, pineapple fruit cups. Iced coffee is on sale. For some reason, Mexican blankets. I wanted to buy a 99 cent pack of coconut donuts but I bought the fruit instead. I ate it with first a cheap plastic pick and then my hands and was still hungry. I felt very silly. I talked to the cashier enthralled by the fact she was from this small town in Michigan which is just all highways. I swiped through Tinder to see what the people were like. How metropolitan of me.

I was annoyed by the way the arm of the woman sitting next to me on the bus was just a little too close to mine. But then she looked at the two fruit cups in her hands and offered me one. I grew red, accepted the fruit cup, and got to know her. She was in Ann Arbor for a funeral and hoped to be a successful theater costume designer. She smelled like marshmallows, as all nice people do.

My other favorite part of Michigan was eating a burrito slathered in ranch and walking around the campus, imagining another life in which I went to UMich. So you could pass by these people, and never see them again on campus? I asked this with a high-pitched and dramatic screech in my voice. I chewed on chicken gristle, letting the thought churn.

Before I left, Jeff gave me his school t-shirts. It was warm in Ann Arbor when I left, so I wore one on the bus back to Chicago. The sun and the blue sky tricked me from the inside of the seaweed bus, the insulated windows had played me, it was cold when I stepped out.

I put on a jacket I stored in my bag. I had packed, estimated, predicted, envisioned, worried right.