I stumble through life alone, in the store, trying sunglasses on.
And fuck if people don’t hate when you’re pathless, happy, when all the milligrams add up to driving 95 and not thinking “crash.” When the coast and the long tapered candles and the watered down wine is enough. Your mind, the cat, both so beautiful. Enough.
“How do you not have a savings account?” Shame poured on me incandescent as he says it. It just comes right off, like a special cloth you’d buy from an infomercial. (Remember them? The Diet-Coke-Silver remotes with the buttons-some of them were red-you could really press down on.)
“Not” is categorically inaccurate. There’s $300 in it.
“I don’t have a savings account, just everything I’ve ever wanted,” I say; the truth covered up in a thrift market sheet (cotton, well-patterned).
I was meant to live by Cherry Street, I think, and die on hills I set fires to. There’s so much flutter, happenstance, static, windows crashing, it’s hard to pine for anything, all things considered, but still, I do. Pine for all of it.
A wondrous ache. In living, in longing, in wondering where all of the art went. I get high and I miss how cigarette smoke smells in Philadelphia. Think of the grease-geared conversations and the roads pitted like the curve of my cheek bones, like stars.
Everything that I find precious, other people throw in the trash: “Return To Sender” letters, crumbling, faded-ink copies of wine tasting notes. receipts for gasoline, speeding tickets, hearts better left fading radiation levels in abandoned power plants. I can’t believe I used to mind this-being overdressed or overlooked or the maroon consequences from an online-course phlebotomist.
The fog and the frizz of Ritz under a littered, navy sky. Lighting matches, speaking Spanish, talking about the Industrial Revolution, (“Caitlin, not again, please.”) British accents, “I think we should go,” misunderstanding context on the way home. Ironic, polluted, loud.
With startling cruelty, I blushed as I turned around; starved, awful, bitter, pretty, alive.
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