You ever get in the shower and then smell the cigarettes washing off you and you think when did I have cigarettes and maybe a little part of you remembers so you stop thinking about it and you just let the water hit you for a bit?
You ever have one of those Sundays where you’re just trying to make it out without ending it all and you’re flipping between household chores and laying, staring at your phone, and everything feels so crushing and then the roommates dog wanders in and you can breathe again for a minute?
I had this professor once, I don’t remember her name but I remember she’d always bring in this homemade peanut butter to eat while we read or took a quiz or watched a video, and whatever her name was, she’d always say “losing builds character” in this thick French accent and I think she meant “failing” not “losing” but it doesn’t matter and here I am years later still smelling that peanut butter, thinking about how much fuckin’ character I’ve built up by now, wondering where the French professor is now, wondering if I passed that class or not.
This other professor I had, the one who used to call his ex-wife “the complaint department” and who used to say I had to trust him, since he had once shaken Sinatra’s hand, that one, once interrupted my question during a lab, I don’t remember the question now, but he interrupted it and I remember being surprised at his volume and he said “someone at some point convinced you that life was going to be so much harder” and I remember looking back him trying to understand and we just looked at each other for awhile and I think I said never-mind or something or maybe we just moved on and I still think about it sometimes.
“Not everyone is good at their job” said Laurel. “That doesn’t mean anything", I said back. She sighed like I wasn’t getting it.
The last time you see the house was on your phone, on a little pixelated horizontal video that your dad sends in the wrong family group chat, the video only shows a few rooms, you see your dog, or a pixelated panting form you know is him, and the room you used twice a year for Thanksgiving and Easter, and the next room: that room you spent the majority of your waking life in, that room that you spent more of your life than you or your parents had planned on, the room you got in trouble in and got sad in and got mad in and laughed in and cried in. But the panning is so quick and you left that room and you forget what the view out the back looks like already, not really but your dad’s walking to the front door and you see your mom walk by but can’t tell what she’s feeling and then it’s the view out the front door where you got dropped off and picked up and ran through for decades and then the little video stops because that’s all he took even though there’s a whole house left but you have a new text anyway because someone’s wondering if dinner tomorrow is still on and what they should bring and you leave that for tomorrow.
“Do you think if you took life a little more seriously it would look a lot different?” his dad asked. “I think so.” He answered, keeping his eyes on the road.
There’s this guy who opens his phone every morning to find an email thanking him for his application, a long with a promise they’ll keep his resume on file if a position opens up that fits his profile.
There was this guy he met called Dorian. He was that kind of hot that looked like his face had never received any bad news. He looked like his grocery store checkout line was always the one moving the quickest. He looked like he never needed to learn how to read.
Do you wonder what happened to that girl in your high school who went blind that one year? Did she come back the next year? You’d remember if she had left but you’d also remember if she’d gotten better? How does that happen?
One year I decided I would watch every movie Scott Caan was in. I didn’t decide it until halfway through August but there weren’t that many, it was going to be easy. ■