It used to take only one bad night for you to learn how to whip yourself into shape. Now, suddenly, you’re gambling away your time like it lives in abundance under a brown leather jacket that smells faintly of spilt cinnamon whiskey and the occasional cheap cigarette. Maybe your surroundings
introduced the wobbly excuse of relativity you throw back into the mirror. At least I don’t do molly like the friend I left back in high school. But saying it out loud feels like humiliation—ritualistic and reeking of the same bitterness that leaves you shivering in the dead of those nights when you no longer remember the answer, yet you are stone-cold sober.
Sometimes it creeps into the eight hours you spend with your coworkers the first time you are all off the clock and in the same room. Maybe it’s under the lid of the candles you only burn at Christmastime. Or it’s in the quiet heartache of lying awake next to the girl who only remembers she loves you when she’s asleep. You only grasp it for a moment before it turns away from you, silently, ignoring your outstretched hands. It flickers away into a golden
mist that smells faintly of some sort of cologne or perfume—though you’ll be
perpetually indecisive over which one it is.
Between the soft bars of John Coltrane’s work, you forget the last time you were not waiting for something unnamed—which is curious, because we all know you never seem to forget anything. Memory is a weapon that only finds its target between your untamed eyebrows, where your mother once put bindis before you rejected the feeling of empty air underneath your
chaniya and selected something more maradana when November rolled around.
In the time it takes you to determine whether you are kind or just self-sacrificial, the cat will go hungry. Alex Supertramp was found with seeds and mold in his system and you will do everything to ensure nothing in the fridge is expired without first checking the pears on the countertop. Next time, leave the stove on and the door unlocked, why don’t you? ▲
