“no anonymity for trial, error, and…”

Diane Sawyer, there was never anonymity. There isn’t any, even in the subtle tolerance high school and college provide. Leave Britney alone! Here’s the part where she cries…

I currently write on the kitchen counter, headphones overbearing like the glare of everyday drosophila. The bullet planner’s now a host for lists, phrases overheard, and brands with new commercials playing songs I don’t want to lose track of. I listen to interviews from 2003, late into the night, well after reading what’s conventionally relevant sometime around noon. I eat my cereal with bits of banana, and soon, I’ll walk out for more sweet fruit that cues the flies’ song before I open the window that invites the least light.

The hallway’s angrier than usual, someone’s girlfriend arguing about how she should’ve been the green Power Ranger, ignoring suggestions to order pizza and sit back calmly with a cold Mike’s Hard Lemonade. I pour myself more cereal, sing David Bowie’s “Five Years” three times in a row because I’m sickly fond of the thought of a beautiful person unaware he’s in a song. Like a girl with her headphones behind a brick wall as I’m sitting in a car of a friend driving by, a friend who knowingly misses my apartment complex because wasting gas surpasses several hours alone in its vocalized comforts.

The afternoon brought the best nap in perhaps the last three weeks. No headache, bruised thighs, or wrists not wanting to work. Of course, I ate cereal before falling asleep, three bananas spread like a fan across the counter. No sunlight found. I only smelled rain and reminded myself that the library still charges thirty-five cents per item, per day that it lingers on the table. I wrote a list of every book I probably took home since I was twelve years old. An Egg on Three Sticks remains a novel I want to reread.

I opened that book a long time ago. Fourteen years. 2003. Yeah, that sounds about right.