Worst case scenario:

the MTA does not give me my $112 back

for the first charge that didn’t give me more time.

I got more, producing the proof of two swipes

which collide in one 30 day run of a double indulgence

I didn’t mean below Myrtle on Sunday. I guess I can just

deny myself $112 worth of activities in the month to come,

swapping the bar with my mom and collapsing

the latter half of the day into a single meal, the second

superimposed on the first, just like the purchase I cannot get over.

The public hotline doesn’t get that I’m young, the stakes of this

towering not like the highest building in the world

but maybe the tallest in Brooklyn, which I walked by today

on my way back from watching the runners pour down Lafayette

in a neat, self-regulating sequence of increasing age & fatigue.

I did get that this was momentous, many times over, by volume,

the crowds progressing through the cavity created by the crowds,

stagnant on the sides. So many neon fabrics fail to highlight the

single line they run over, the runner, sporting hot citrus just as

every other, gaining nothing in the proliferated showiness of

Nike’s well executed sell. Each swatch of it wicking self-regulating

beads of moisture away from the laborer whose temperature is

up to some other shit, indifferent to the sympathy of salt that

now rains down on him. Where do they wick it away?

Some were handing out Haribo gummy bears to stragglers,

lured & sunk by the simple math of losing a few seconds

in a race already heckling their tired heels for the relief of

some fifteen drops of bear-shaped sweetness, so limited in

a fun-sized edition, no-doubt straggling, just as they are,

behind the ones gifted to kids on Thursday. Halloween was so

awkwardly placed this year, perfectly flanked by two buffers

that relieved me of the need to compete in a relay I lost as a kid.

I was so terrified by the preface to a routine loss of singularity

that I was taken to a warehouse full of Broadway costumes,

and got one so inimitable that I was too embarrassed to wear it.

I have been a pumpkin for every year since. It is so much easier to

sell theories that dress up in pop, safe inside the softness of

cotton batting, the flesh of the drupe, a commonality so disinterested in

prestige that I can smuggle razors therein lodged as a pit, asserting private shape,

like the Furby’s plastic center, chirping tenets on loop, gaining amnesty

from the commercial triumph of the cute, bear-shaped exterior, while stealing

something of its ability soothe, the hard voice box threatening the soft costume that absolves it.

Today feels easy. I only watched the runners expel everything into the valley I implied

with my sideline volume on Lafayette. I got a free bagel at the party on the stoop

which formed the bank of the road where Dana’s roommate stopped and

cried for a second, before leaving her family confused about why. Some figured

the stress fracture was bearing it all in this attempt to elevate all-weather human omnipotence

above the arbitrary date of an annual event. I relieve stress as I take breakfast. This bagel,

removing a solid dollar off my anxiety, not quite plentiful enough for me to feel

the dent of its charity, but ever since the obsession of Oakland on replay, I have

been telling myself that moments of unprecedented excess do repeat with

new content claiming the fresh vacancy of familiar slots. This is just one.

There may not be 111 more to come just as warm & delicious as this, the others

bearing shapes I can’t summon like colors without name. I feel that dinner reservations

must be some sort of strategic bait that promises future instances of my frame to be

the same as the one that’s now prisoner its current collapse, knowing that this fact can be

swallowed, prophylactic like the zinc tablets I’ve been downing since last night. To be clear,

I am totally loving this extra hour, daylight saves me and continues to thrill beyond

its logical appeal, as the effects of helium, balloon sucked after countless balloon.

The fog I woke up in is equal to that of last Saturday—the morning suffix to

taxing aerobics of the night before, though this time not tied to the lovesick heats

of Friday with a foreigner in Park Slope. The fog envelops me, soft like the cotton

that sells me, stealing everything of the voice box dislodged in my center, misaligned

because, God, I can’t seem to catch up on the sleep I would need to proceed

from the center in a way such that I recognize the pitch, mine, contiguous,

without the blur of 3D imagery, glimpsed from a poverty of glasses. I grow big

inside the simplicity of empty replies, like I just texted Hannah “it’s ok”

to something already implicitly fine and yet pertaining to a bigger picture

so delicate that the blandness of my back-and-forth might just say

something of the blasphemy I perceive in the contamination of this past with the

heartbreakingly arbitrary vocabulary of its extemporaneous exit. It pertained to

Dana, or the superimposition of myth on a person I hung out with this morning.

These zinc tablets have changed the taste of my tongue which changes

the taste of everything, so I have resolved to eat nothing but these, agreeing

to a conceit not present in the making but definitely selling the good beyond

its worth. I covet the small economy of Haribo sweetness, doled out to the river but not

the bank, the one I form in solidarity with the spectacular solid on the concrete.

I have to call my bank, let them know of the charge I stuttered in my

Sunday fog. For now I eat only zinc, knocking off dollars that I swallow

for all they’re worth. The marathon runs dry. I go get hummus at Black Iris with Dana,

my teacher from boarding school who invited me to the stoop in the first place.

This is the only part that matters. I mourn the cost, exaggerate the negligence of

the way I digest, bearing today my kiddish ways that invite what

baggy concern I once learned how to love and renounce back in

boarding school, weaning slowly, vestigial to this day.