I hate the way sunlight looks on concrete. There’s goddamn dunes of asphalt between me and fun things. Trick yourself into a soldier’s diligence just to reach the bus stop, then you see the driver nod and the payment register without issue and a woman move her bag to make room for you and there’s nothing to justify the finger you had down your throat or your jig of angst by the front door. There’s a gallon of coffee crumbling my guts. I should have investments in stocks by now probably, whatever that entails.

I don’t loathe the bus. I come from a house of shut doors. Quiet hallways. The secluded cave-ways of respected privacies. I look out the window, at lagged graphics of dead trees, a b-roll of resigned skies, and remember I’m motherless. You see the abstract whirl of vivid lights, feel the patient verve stack in neighbour seats, and you think of her. Think of dancing, an eye’s starved embrace, of hands clasped together and playful fingers wanting more. An explosion of unabashed intimacy. Eventually, you get where you’re going and you get there absolutely alone.

Feeling hungry, but I’d rather sleep, and sooner vomit. There’s about three more centuries of this, then the rumoured something better. I’m no patron to that suspense. Living half your life in fantasies doesn’t mean you buy into dreams. You just see them, dwell a little, drink some: water if the morning’s kind and sobering and ready to be accomplished, brown liquor if you don’t want to learn how well you’d handle it. They don’t know the threat their encounters pose. If they did, they’d play their music louder and feel too ashamed to shimmy. No one even nods their heads. Like we’re all of us blasting brown noise, swirling and chafing, picking idly at the guilty minutes until our destination finds us. There’s nowhere I desire that a steel case can ship me.

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Parking lot. Lobby. Office. Eventually home again, where in the smog of carpets and hoodies and marijuana I’ll guess which driver, passenger, clerk, or patient might’ve been my best friend, my lover, my future, had they any benefit to garner from it and me any spirit to flourish for them. Hunched, moping past ores, sighing at the glittering shallows, guessing at gold and silver and even brass, that could too be beloved, but the pick scrapes and splinters and I’ll eat my cereal with blisters on my palm, stinging the spoon-hand. There’s no space for sex in my pillow-fort.