aSoSS 40 | Leeway

…and she responds, and doesn’t get weird, or defensive, like you.

[mouth agape]

Yeah, yeah, it’s okay. Me too.

Trader Joe’s, 12:00PM, 11/24/2024

every shipman is aware of the dangers of slack, a knife of potential cutting across the air. and yet we have tiptoed around the topic for too long, each of us too scared to wake the current and lose the line. like a cruel childhood game–whoever moves first loses!–your hands are at your mouth and i am on one knee (as if to tie a shoe, i tell you, but really, do you believe that?) and the moment is frozen in a dream, so vivid a memory could not do it justice. the orange is left to rot on the counter, unpeeled, unsplit. pure and perforated and rotten, at the same time, in all the wrong places.

If you don’t like it, you just hand it to Eileen, be like “cool, now you have two!”

Food Mart, 12:00PM, 12/26/2024

the vice of the human condition is the systematic approach to an unstructured life. you have been tasked with falling in love: go and sit on the bus and hold eye contact and brush the snow out of her hair. a look of surprise overwhelms you. even the most artistic are drawn to scientific conclusions, eliminating every variable at once. everything must go to plan or else it is not the plan at all. a senior thesis: is it, or is it not? the numbers quiver in their sockets.

when you board, the bus is empty, the driver wears sunglasses, and all the snow has melted.

That’s my job, and yeah, you and I have to stick to it because we’ve been way too accommodating!

Traverwood Library, 5:00PM, 1/14/2025

the tap water runs clear and straight–an ominous sign. it was the vietnamese activist Duong Thu Huong who wrote there’s no river without a bend just as there’s no life without its unhappiness. i look around; the room is littered with peanut shells. i am an elephant with a blanket on its back and the room is nothing more than a cage. outside, panem et circenses. the carnival band starts to play and the world is filled with all the notes of an obituary.