7

When is it clean? When is the mountainous pile of past a neat and orderly present?

When I started to ask myself these questions, I knew I was getting back to the old ways, the micromanaging ways that ended with a disorder that made me pull out chunks of my hair. Trichotillomania, they called it. Trich. Trick. Damn, but wasn’t it tricky.

When I asked myself these questions, I knew I was getting too philosophical, too sneaky and clever and like the way I used to be, when I read Plato and Aristotle and then made sure everyone knew it because it wasn’t just enough to be worldly. Everyone had to know I was worldly.

6

I do not know who I am what I am or where we are.

This is a lot of not knowing and it’s incredibly disconcerting and let me tell you that this is why I don’t usually drink. And I don’t usually do what we did. But last time I did and we did and I think it was fun but I don’t really remember.

So the where we are is actually a legitimate concern. That’s actually something I do not know. It’s someone’s house. Probably yours. Hopefully yours.

But the who I am or what I am is something more of a personality crisis. Maybe an identity crisis. Because like I said, this is not me.

5

I smell like coffee. This is the remnants of a too-clean and caffeine-filled life.

Once upon a time, I may have smelled like something else, my classic coffee-and-vanilla combo, former from my morning beverage of choice, latter from my perfume, the same perfume I’ve used since the seventh grade. Sometimes I get something like self-pity out of the thought that I, the burgeoning professional, uses the same perfume she used as a zit-pitted middle schooler, but then I remember that I just really like the way I smell, and so what does it matter anyway?

I’m sure at some point, I smelled differently. I must have spent my early years with that unmistakable baby smell, the one that’s impossible to replicate after the age of four. You can use Johnson&Johnson’s baby shampoo and baby wash until you’re thirty, but you’re going to lose that smell. I hypothesize that it has something to do with not maintaining an entirely milk diet. Though I do drink milk, still. It’s childish and unsophisticated, but I love milk. It’s delicious.

4

Today, by my own admission, I am old.

I am old because I know that the plural of passerby is passersby and I remember the original GameBoy when the present young generation is lost in a haze of Nintendo DS. My childhood is no longer a present—it’s just a past, because there isn’t any child living it now. Things are different, times they are a-changing, as the song goes and all that jazz.

Think about when we were young. I had this pair of shoes that was made entirely out of this malleable plastic—we called them jelly shoes. They had stripes in them, like the too-popular gladiators of today. We would play in the dirt and not care and Dad would carry us upstairs to the bath so we could wash our feet. When we took off our shoes, we could see the stripes of dirt. We don’t use that bathtub anymore, because we don’t live in that house, because there weren’t enough rooms after Kelsey was born.

3

I am: me. I am what I am what we are when I’m a group of us. When something that I am comes into play. Together I add a general flavor of being of feeling of seeing, a sense of individuality and all that other trite shit.

I am: myself. Unable to create a carbon copy. Glasses meet writer meet brown hair meet color guard meet pale skin meet choosy insomniac. Friends I have and friends I don’t are part of everything. We come into a trippy metaphysical connection, a spider web of something that is an existence ad maybe I’m making this purposefully babbling for the sake of the incense and the hippy summers and the way I’m wearing a sweater even though it’s august.

2

I clove the clove in half, releasing the scent into the scene, making you sneeze. Oh, but wasn’t wordplay fun but anyway. Don’t worry, I’m just messing with you.

That’s not really how the story goes. The story goes like this:

Once upon a time, I hit you with my car. Oops. Maybe you shouldn’t have been running down the street in the dark with dark clothes on. Luckily for you, I was only driving like ten miles an hour, because I was going down my new street for the first time, and wasn’t entirely confident I could find my own damn house in the dark.

1

You let the snot drip from your nose onto your sleeves—that’s how we knew you were truly miserable. It was ridiculous, how far you’d let yourself go. All this over some girl. Some stupid girl.

“Jude.” You were blotchy and spotty and had a pile of tissues building up next to you, for when you actually bothered to wipe your damn nose. You were Julian and I was the only one who called you Jude, after the Beatle kid, and I was June and so it was extra fun because our names sounded sort of similar.