bed

My bed looks the same every day.

As I get into it, as I make it, as I stand from it, as it peeks into view past my computer screen.

But it doesn't feel the same, not every day.

Sometimes it reassures me, firm like a car seat.

I fall asleep and then I wake up.

Sometimes it feels like a basement, the kind that is cold and haunted even though it's finished and carpeted. The kind where you stay smiling, but you also stay close.

Sometimes it feels like an insignia. “Look at him - so grown, so clean.”

Sometimes I want to throw tomato juice on it and go for a walk.

I remember a bed with bright yellow sheets where I expanded and contracted into myself.

I remember a wood-framed bed in a sage room with a fetal indentation.

I remember knowing, as soon as I touched a bed or brought someone into it, that I'd never be there with them again.

I remember sitting on the edge of a quilted bed, marring a friendship for months.

I remember a cold bed by the window with an invisible line down the middle.

I remember a warm, cushioned bed with a water bottle and a dog cage beside it.

I remember a leather couch that I employed for distance.

I remember a series of beds in which I laid next to no one and rose hours after the sun.

I remember a deep peace in a familiar bed in a new apartment, just for a moment.

I remember hoping, believing maybe that was the bed where I belonged.

My own bed is a cast-iron, seasoned by recipes I thought I wanted.

My bed is a ceiling fresco in progress, and for now, I sleep only among its fading depictions.

thrif•ted

Feb 16, ‘23

I've stained my upholstery and muddied my floors.

I've cracked my mug and shattered my phone.

This is why we can't have nice things

The buttons are falling off my coat, the zippers from my luggage.

My jewelry is tarnishing, my nails chipping.

This is why people have nice things.

fluf·fing, 9

"That shit goes so hard, it's like motorboating my dopamine receptors" Written about a bowl of cereal topped with granola. I met a man at a shoe store who smiled at me genially every time emerged from the back room, fetching another size for me to try on, knowing full well I wasn't buying a pair today. He told me the French are mostly dickheads but that I should try talking to strangers in cafés. Do romantic moments actually happen? Do people meet each other in public and just hit it off? Are romantic gestures as we're told about them actually romantic? Or are they rhetorical? Persuasive? We got drinks twice with the shoe store man. He said that recently some visiting Parisians had asked Toulousains if they have running water. I heard a podcast about how we're attracted to what we know, which means that if our childhood featured certain conditions, good or bad, we will naturally affix ourselves to people who exemplify them. Does Ben Aldridge have worship pastor energy, is that the connection? Toulouse is the 4th largest city in France, by the way. What's the word for addiction to malaise?