I am not sentimental about firsts or lasts

You feel sorry for when you use hot water. You go to mass sometimes, and you feel bad when you can’t make it because you have a job and other responsibilities. 

You feel proud of a couple things in life. Like the fact you make really good Vietnamese coconut sweet and sour soup. I can't remember the recipe you told me. You sew most of your clothes, but I couldn’t tell you if you were proud of that or quietly accepting of that. Maybe that you want to be the latter but are really the former, and you don’t think you like that. It's hard to accept some truths. 

You are sitting at your desk, waiting for small digital numbers on the corner of the screen to click forwards gently towards three perfect circles and a line. In the new digital age, the numbers are not large blocks but elegant curving lines that choose a bourgeois choices of a million dots to turn on to, so many different states just to change the elongation of the circles to be skinny ellipses. The line flourished with a sloping top and a straight bottom that seems to join the singular, important vertical line in an upwards motion. You are comfortable with it all, finding peace in the minimalism.

Before that, today, you would have a coffee, from one of those Starbucks glass bottles that contained a beautiful brown slosh of caramel because they didn’t have any mochas today. You supposed you should be grateful to even have one, even though you kind of didn’t like caramel, but not even in a way that could be thought of as an opinion. A quiet frantic interwoven pulsation. You feel it deep in your chest. You should be grateful because it cost money, and it was a blessing to be able to spend money on something like this because of the desk you were at waiting for the small digital numbers to change.

We’re a little after that coffee, now, and we’re in the second between 7:18:04 and 7:18:05. There’s a long way towards that beloved 10:00, let alone 10:00:01 or 10:00:02. I don't know anymore. You have plans tonight, the way one does when you have a loved one crawling between the tissues and water of your skin. You wonder if they feel it like a slow burning itch deep within your muscles you absolutely have to get out, or if it is more like a jumping love bug spark that crackles in your head like a million static shocks. One or the other, never both at the same time. Never again, not anymore.

After the coffee you feel pleasantly on focus again, especially now that the sun is slowly creeping downwards. You are surrounded by huge glass windows in between industrial steel rebar from the ceiling to the floor, and the colors in the windows are going from blue to orange to red to dark blue as the time moves back and forwards. Outwards are a spread of orange tinted plywood encased in resin for large slab desks meant to eat up some impact. You consider the illogicalities of that. They move outwards from your point of view like the tutorials for how to do one point perspectives. You draw a blue pencil line from the point you look at all the way to the end of the paper of your eyes.

You think about driving your car back, now at 7:18:06, or maybe we’re a long way before that cutoff of this second and the next. You’re driving to school in a small hybrid car with a plasticky blue knob for a gear selector and a sticker placed on top of the knob to cover up most of the blue clear plastic. The sticker makes it work worse, but you don’t mind because it’s cute and it makes you happy most of the time to see it in the morning. It gives personality to your dullness.

The light filters in through the windshield that feels like such cheap glass it might as well be thick slabs of acrylic feeling material somehow thinned out. It holds the light with the softness of a plastic, but maybe that’s the refraction from the sad gray shade of the interior of the car. Some of the panels give way to show that it really is made from panels, not some magical single piece that you feel like it should be. The screen of the radio is digital and only displays the letters blocked out in LED rectangles AUX when you play the only music you will in your car off your phone. Today, it’ll be some sort of song about where feelings and events only happen through meaningless ambience. The tone-deafness of your life making it hard for you to imagine it another way, and you do not feel anything about that.

What did you have for breakfast? Maybe today you’ll have sago pudding after you asked your brother to buy it for you and ship it on over since you couldn’t find any sago in the grocery stores. You were in the middle of walking around the aisles at 6:48 pm and the realization that you were not going to find the sago moved down like the sun in the sky. You wished you could pretend to believe that you might still find it. The sun might hop back up right before it touched the bottom edge of the sky. There is always some little instance of hope to be known. You can almost reach out and grab it.

You thought about the shorts you left at my house and the motion in which you took them off in the balmy night of the apartment with no air conditioning. We were drinking together with these tiny teacups that I bought from Ikea because they were small, and I guess we are all children at heart. We, who would stop in the Target and look at toys, and say, "oh, have you seen these little dolls on TikTok and how they change their outfits and give them makeovers?"

I would think about how I wish I had done that as a kid too, and I would never really wonder what you were thinking. I figure I wouldn't understand. I knew it was your dominion over your kingdom. 

It was not mine. No, not anymore.