You are here and this is where you are supposed to be. But for some reason, your toes still tingle and you can’t sleep, but you don’t want to get out of bed and all you can do is eat Ritz crackers and read books to exhaust your brain.
There are flies in the house because of the summer heat and they don’t want to go outside and neither do you. You stop swatting them away after you realize this.
Your mom asks to borrow just a hundred bucks and when you start to worry and panic about that little number with the dollar sign becoming even more little, she tells you that you’re trying to grow up too fast. Bills, bills, bills, that’s all you hear and that’s all she says.
So you start to think that maybe you should go back to school and work a little and say goodbye to your friends because maybe you do have to grow up a little faster, after all. And then it hurts and it hurts like hell because you never told the boy that you love that you love him and there are a lot of books that will go unread if you spend your nights waiting on tables.
And then you can feel your bones become restless and nights sleepless and maybe you should just go outside. So you take your book in hand and read some Bukowski, but still the fidgeting does not subside. Days have passed and you still can’t pay for school or tell your lover that you love him out loud. Can I borrow another hundred bucks? Mom says.
You want a blue bicycle and an airplane ticket so you put it on a plastic card and promise to pay it back later. This makes you happy because your roommates promise to make mornings coffee-filled and never lonely, but you check the weather and it’s supposed to rain the week you fly in and the week after that and the week after that. This makes you sad.
And now it seems like your lover is mad at you and your mother is mad at you and maybe you made the wrong decision trying too hard to be responsible. And your gut is twisting and you can’t write like you used to and now you have no coffee money and an airplane ticket to a place you do not want to go.
Your mother talks to machine voices on the phone and she owes x amount of dollars and y amount of cents. Neither of you say anything at the supper table because she is tired of yelling and so are you. But she yells at you when you clean the dishes and you yell back, the word ‘fuck’ flying around so loudly that the neighbors can hear upstairs. It is embarrassing for the both of you.
You finish reading a poem about beer and one about how to be a good writer and then you wonder what makes a writer good, anyway? This is scary and makes the cavity in your heart even larger and your lungs dense and your limbs heavy. Maybe you should have majored in law or business because most writers kill themselves, anyway.
Soon you’ll have to board a plane with people who do not talk to you and live in a strange place with people who do not know you and say goodbye to your lover and just leave it at that. The plastic wraps of the Ritz remnants are becoming mountainous and the heat outside unbearable. You hear your mother hang up the phone, tell the operator to go fuck themselves, and swat a fly on the kitchen counter.
