A Good Egg
“DID I TELL YOU,” I bellowed into the yawning chasm of existence, on the first day of a new month of a new year, of renewed body and refreshed mind, “THAT I AM DOING A CLEANSE?”
Before Hamhock and I left for our trip to Thailand and Vietnam, I knew that my body would be taking a beating because I have no self-control. We were going to a part of the world where beers cost a few bucks and you can still smoke indoors, so I figured I’d give my liver a head start by avoiding alcohol for the month of January. Dry January, they call it, an attempt to start the year off right, to cure your body of what you did over the winter holidays, to be a better person. This, of all years, will be the year you are not walking acid reflux, where you take care of yourself, where you will floss. I was only asking four weeks of sobriety for and from myself, just thirty-one days, though I’d never gone that long without a glass of wine since I started drinking. My trip would be self-indulgent enough, complete with what the locals call a Bucket of Joy: ice, Red Bull, Sprite, and rum or whisky. It’s a death wish served in a frosty pail, and I was going to drink all of them.
Before I would get there, however, I’d drain my body of its toxins, eat right, go to the gym, and drink plenty of water. I’d talk about yoga. (I wouldn’t, like, go to yoga, but I’d talk about it. If I’ve learned anything from white women, it’s that the best kind of yoga is the kind you talk about fucking constantly.)
It’s not that I drink a lot. I rarely drink during the week, and my weekend drinking generally consists of juuuust enough wine to make me forget about the three times I’ve accidentally sent my boss a furious and deeply intimate Facebook message intended for Hamhock. But I like alcohol because it induces a kind of stupor I can control, one that comes in gentle waves, that I can keep at bay with water and disco fries or make harsher with amber-coloured liquor. Booze has, probably, played a bigger part in my life than I ever intended. (Though what is a “normal” amount of alcohol for someone with a baseline level of childhood trauma? Is it worse if I rim a Tom Collins with crushed Children’s Tylenol? LET ME LIVE.) My birthdays get increasingly foggy thanks to pinot over dinner; good news is celebrated with off-brand champagne. (“You can’t call it champagne if it’s not from Champagne,” Hamhock says as I try to saw his head off with a broken bottle.) Every important relationship I’ve had has been formed over a beer. Hamhock and I met at a kegger hosted by his friend in a dimly lit backyard. I went with my best friend, and while Hamhock failed to persuade me to do a keg stand, my buddy did it twice while I held his glasses. I poured him into a cab at two in the morning as he purred a pitiful, “You’re a good egg.” Alcohol is the great equalizer. Alcohol makes you brave. Alcohol makes you beautiful. Alcohol makes you fall in love.
I didn’t grow up in a home with much alcohol consumption. Mom gets loaded from one or two glasses of very tart white wine, and Papa will have a Scotch merely, I think, because he likes saying, “Gimme two fingers!” while holding up his index and pinky, five inches apart. (Then he laughs, which is your cue to also laugh.) He becomes gregarious for an hour and then calls it a night. I didn’t drink much in high school either, missing that phase where everyone discovers how sexy and touchable they are when they nurse four ounces of warm raspberry Sour Puss in a red party cup. I went to one house party at seventeen, a month after graduation, drank two Smirnoff Ices, and wondered where everyone’s parents were.
When I moved to Toronto for university, I was still two years younger than the legal drinking age. I didn’t move into a residence but, rather, into a Best Western hotel where five floors were converted into student housing. The beds had been taken out and two small plastic cots were installed, with a flimsy plastic barrier between them to offer some semblance of privacy from the stranger sleeping four feet from your head. My roommate was a Chinese exchange student who told me, repeatedly, her name was Alice, but she carried around books and paperwork with the name Mia scrawled on them. (Alice/Mia vanished without notice after the first semester, leaving behind only a pair of broken flip-flops.) The rest of the building otherwise still functioned as a hotel, so while tourists checked in to this crumbling, unkempt building sandwiched between what was then the city’s oldest gay bathhouse and a private middle school filled with teens who owned Amexes, a few hundred seventeen-, eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-olds were getting fucked up. We attempted to break into the pool (which was off limits), and tried to pry our eleventh-floor windows open to throw pennies at pedestrians.
That Best Western was where I learned how to drink. In high school, I was too paranoid my parents would show up and force their fingers down my throat to make me vomit the puddles of beer I choked down. But here, here I could be fun without threat of retribution. And I was learning that I needed to be fun if I was going to get anyone to talk to me.
When you’re a girl, you learn pretty fast that boys will like you if you can drink. Not if you will drink, but if you can drink like the boys and hold it together. Girls don’t get to be sloppy, they don’t get to boot ’n rally. They have to be buzzed, perpetually, while still keeping up, playing beer pong, taking shots, being fuckable, being fun. The first adult I ever had a crush on—five years older than me, with skin so white I wanted to ruin it with crayons—once told me, “You can really drink for a girl.” It was a badge of honour. Later, he amended it: “I’ve never seen a brown girl drink like you can.” He was impressed. I was impressive. I was fun. And I felt brave. Drinking does that, makes you feel like you can crush the world under your heel, or possibly seduce it into submission.
But girls don’t actually get to drink like boys because boys do things to girls when they drink. When I was a teenager, the world told me that a girl is responsible for her own body if she’s raped or assaulted when she’s drunk: that’s her fault, it’s on her to not get so drunk she stops being fun and starts being a liability. My parents always told me drinking was risky, that it opened up the recesses of a man’s brain and made him primal and territorial. Of course that’s bad, we were told, but it’s up to you to keep yourself safe. For the first few weeks at the hotel, when I was invited to different parties in different dorm rooms, when older students offered to buy drinks for me, I attended reluctantly, in bulky clothes and with unbrushed hair. I refused to let anyone touch my drink, no one could open a beer for me, no one was allowed to offer me a cup, even an empty one—I’d bring my own. I was learning how to be fun, sure, but the threat loomed: one of the guys here can take it away from you in a heartbeat, and it’ll be your fault.
I missed university orientation when I moved, so I started classes knowing no one except a vegan girl in my program who also happened to live down the hall from me. (She would not be a friend. I and a few boys in the dorm borrowed a dormmate’s bearskin rug, draped it over ourselves, and stormed into her room to scare her.)
But within the first few weeks, I met Jeff, a rowdy boy a year older than me who wore old T-shirts unironically and looked like he could lift a car over his head. I hated him immediately: he was loud and self-confident and in the middle of the day—sober, I figured—he was fun, and that just seemed unfair. He was from Canada’s farmland, a verified country bro who, had he gone to my high school, would have been polite but unfeeling towards me. Jeff came with another boy, a narrow-faced, skinny-legged seventeen-year-old named Matt Braga. I hated him more than I hated Jeff: he was weaselly and had saucer-eyeballs that bulged when he caught you in a mistake, and if you asked him a question, he’d lean back in his chair and fold his arms and say, “Aaaaaahhhhhmmmm,” before answering. He looked like a baby so I called him Baby Braga. He didn’t like it, but it didn’t matter because I didn’t like him.
These two were the worst, but Jeff threw the best parties and Baby Braga was always there. Jeff lived in the residence on campus, where floor after floor was unsupervised hedonism, where Red Bull sponsored a party in one of the common rooms and underage teens drank freely. Jeff invited me to a party on his floor the first time we hung out after class. I didn’t trust him, this tall, beast-like man who drank too easily and had too much fun for comfort. “Baby Braga’s coming too,” he assured me. “And you can bring whoever you want. Come on.” I agreed, passed out on his floor early the next morning, and woke up briefly when he carried me to his bed. He slept in another room. In the morning, he brought me orange juice.
“See?” he said. “I knew you’d have fun.”
I nodded and rubbed my eyes. “I think we have to be friends now.”
He adjusted his hat and pulled a cigarette out from behind his ear. “That’s usually how it works.”
Jeff poured strong drinks and never asked for my money. Merely by existing, he seemed to encapsulate what you were supposed to do in university: he was flippant and dedicated to little more than partying and getting to know girls and creating an elite social circle of Cool People who did Cool Things. We either sat in the back of the class and sneered at everyone else, because we were effortlessly smart so we didn’t have to listen, or sat in the front of the class, to prove we knew everything already. We were where the party was, for once meaning I wasn’t chasing a party or searching for the right place to be: we were the place to be. Baby Braga, too, got wrapped up in how much your life changes when you’re given permission to be young and selfish. People texted us, for once, asking where we were and if they could come. Braga was erudite, hardly a risk-taker, a little shy and plenty anxious. I was too, but with Jeff, we got to be whatever we wanted. I didn’t watch my drinks anymore, or worry about other men, because Jeff did it for me. We went to a nightmare bar off campus called Dance Cave where girls barfed in plastic cups on the floor and Braga’s glasses slipped off his face and were stomped by moving feet. Jeff and I spent weeks trying to teach Baby Braga how to smoke a cigarette without looking like he was fellating a corn dog. (We never succeeded.) We got to be versions of ourselves that somehow existed in a parallel universe where we were fun.
It took Braga and me far longer to become friends than it took either of us to fall in love with Jeff—but how could you resist Jeff? He was intoxicating, so comfortable shirking responsibility and making you feel like it was the most important thing in the world that you came to this party, like there would never be another one. Baby Braga and I, rather, found each other through beer and Canadian Club after a few months. At yet another party at Jeff’s, we wound up alone in a bedroom and fell backwards on the bed, laughing at something I can’t remember. The lights were dim and our eyes locked, so this was where we were supposed to kiss and ruin everything. Instead, we started laughing maniacally, tears welling up, his voice getting raspy from screaming. “Come on, idiot,” I said, pulling him up by the forearm and leading him back into the kitchen to find some plastic cups for an unnecessary drinking game. (Who needs a game to drink?)
I liked hanging out with Jeff and Baby Braga, partly because spending time with boys was once verboten. Any brown girl can tell you that if you come home with a male friend, your father will kick you out of the house, give you the silent treatment for an indeterminate period of time, or try to hex you in public. Your mother, meanwhile, will weep in the attic. (This is true even if you do not have an attic.) The three of us walked around campus together, went to bars together, had hungover brunches together, a team in perfect synergy where the most important things were each other and then, also, having a good time. We locked arms and marched into the world and we loved each other.
We were invincible thanks to the poisonous combination of youth and loneliness and the drinks that tethered us together. And we really did love drinking, particularly since it allowed us to press a kind of reset button, gave us some psychic break from our lives before starting over in earnest. We could make everything blur together, get ourselves low enough, and tomorrow could be something new entirely. And we figured this would last forever, the three of us, regardless of how our lives would shift. “Everyone’s the worst!” we’d chant, toasting our pint glasses to solidify our bond and rejecting everyone else.
After nights like these, Baby Braga and I would call each other and recount the night before. Jeff, often, was still asleep.
“What happened to Jenna?” I’d ask him.
“She hit her head on the edge of the stove in the kitchen. She was bleeding really badly,” he’d tell me. “I think she went to the hospital.”
We laughed because she was surely okay so it was still fun. It was fun that Jeff wouldn’t wake up until two in the afternoon and then he’d text us, “Brunch?” and we’d laugh because, oh, Jeff, you doofus, it’s two in the afternoon, and you missed all your classes! Later that night, we’d meet up with him and he’d already have two drinks in his system and he’d pick me up and spin me around. He and Baby Braga would sing karaoke sans karaoke machine. He gave me a key to the apartment he shared with four other people (a two-floor rental with two decks, a cavernous kitchen, and a whisper of a bathroom) who were all fun like Jeff, so I came and went as I pleased. One morning I was sitting in the kitchen trying to clean the mess from the night before and Jeff walked in with crate after crate of home-brewed wine. It tasted like toilet juice and it didn’t even last a week.
Another night, Jeff climbed onto the roof of that apartment, jumping from building to building, screaming into the darkness. It was one in the morning and we kept yelling back at him, “You’re going to get arrested!” but we were laughing because this moron never got in trouble. Jeff could have ten drinks and run a marathon, in the dark, sleep-deprived, on rooftops in east downtown. When he finally came back, he pretended to chase me and I pretended to be afraid.
This was our routine for more than two years, but the unsustainable part of our plan was that Jeff never stopped at one or two or three drinks, he always needed to get to ten or fifteen or twenty. When he drank like that, he’d stop singing and sit in his bedroom, slumped over in old clothes, near tears. Baby Braga would try to drag him to Wing Machine to eat something, sober up a little, and when that failed he’d try again the next day. Because this was the point, right? You can always start over the next day.
By the time we were in our third year, Jeff started to forget things, started to shrink. His shoulders were more sloped. He lost so much weight that he was punching new holes in his belts to keep his pants up, and his T-shirts looked like parachutes. He drank faster and harder than us, getting too drunk to walk me home like he used to. Once, I walked home alone at the crack of dawn and was grabbed by a man who tried to throw me to the ground. A passerby chased him off and escorted me the rest of the way, but when I called Jeff in tears, he didn’t answer. The next day, he apologized profusely, saying his girlfriend had been over and they were fighting and he didn’t have his phone. “I don’t know about that,” Baby Braga told me. “I mean, he passed out while I was still there. He was pretty drunk.” I didn’t want to be his burden, his responsibility, because fun girls aren’t needy. We had been doing this for years, consequence-free, and being a woman never changed how I drank around these boys. Baby Braga sometimes walked me home, or texted me to make sure I got back okay after long nights. We were still okay.
But sometimes, Jeff would climb back onto his roof and threaten to kill himself—Braga and I were never sure whether he meant it—and I’d reach my hand up to try and grab his withering arm. “Come on,” I’d say. “Come inside. Let’s make martinis. Let’s have some wine. We can play a drinking game. Come into the kitchen.” He’d nod and smile and swing his legs down but he never really came back to us. He circulated through his own party like a ghost, too drunk to play and too sad to stop.
Jeff chipped his tooth one evening in a series of mysterious events Baby Braga and I couldn’t sort out. He came to class smelling like old cigarette smoke, and the tips of his fingers were turning grey. During breaks, he’d go outside to smoke and glare at the pavement in silence. We watched him from the windows, surly and disconnected, rubbing his eyes and tensing his jaw. At Thanksgiving, he tried to get in a fist fight with all the people he’d invited over for lasagna and gutter wine. I left early, one of the first times a party didn’t interest me as much as being away from it did. Baby Braga texted me that Jeff ripped his shirt off and fell off the roof. But it was okay, because Jeff was our friend, he was just a lot of fun! He would be okay because he had us. Of course a troop of teenagers had the cure for what was possibly a young alcoholic spinning out of control. We would be fine!
I wondered if other people noticed, but how could they not? We were noticing. It was the only thing Baby Braga and I talked about now. Our pal, our passport into a good party, was increasingly a liability. While everyone else we knew was starting to shake off the near-nightly drinking, the back-alley smoking, the endless hot-boxing of bedrooms and bathrooms, Jeff was still there. “Come over,” he’d text me on a Tuesday night. “Let’s have a few.” I’d say no because I had class the next day and I just wanted to stay home. He wouldn’t talk to me for a day or two after, and when he’d eventually come around, he was still angry. “I can’t believe you didn’t come over!” he said. “You missed so much fun.”
By then, most of us were legal drinking age, so the conceit of drowning our evenings and weekends (and sometimes, days) in alcohol appealed to Baby Braga and me less and less. He started calling me—on the phone, something no other nineteen-year-old has ever done barring a physical emergency—to see what I was up to. “Do you want to have dinner?” replaced “What bar are we going to?” Braga and I met for towering sandwiches and weird burgers and simmering plates of cheap Thai food and we talked instead of screamed. We drank coffee. “Jeff’s okay, right?” I’d ask him, and he’d shrug, saying, “How would we even know?”
Baby Braga and I pleaded with Jeff to sober up, just go cold turkey. You can do it, we told him, we’ll help you. Braga talked to him Like A Man, whatever that means, and tried to reassure him that we’d still be around, even when the party was over. I told him that our lives would open up, that maybe the three of us could get an apartment and live together and it would be weird and delightful. Jeff was always drunk when we had these conversations, so he’d hang his head and nod and quietly let a tear drop from his lashes onto his sock. Baby Braga and I kept hanging out with him all the same, kept going to the parties, trying to keep our little world from combusting. Except now, Braga walked me home much earlier.
After nearly three years of being together, our chaos at first joyful and later, muted, Jeff returned from a brief vacation and met me at a frat party. I ran at him and threw myself into his arms for a hug, because it was just us this time. Baby Braga wasn’t around, so it was up to me to keep him alive, keep him bright. He was already drunk, but he was at that perfect place where he wasn’t sullen and dark but gregarious and friendly. He picked me up, just barely, because he wasn’t as strong as he used to be. “Missed you, kid,” he said, because I was always little when we were together.
We didn’t know anyone else at the party, so we drank together. But his mood shifted, because his mood always shifted, and he sat in a leather armchair in the corner and refused to talk. I had plenty of watery beer and lost my temper—one of the many things girls aren’t allowed to do when they drink—and started yelling at him over the music. “What is wrong with you?” I asked. “Just stop drinking. No one’s making you do this. No one’s asking you to come out for this.” The frat had changed all their light bulbs to red, making everything look like blood and panic. “You have a problem,” I cried. He refused to speak to me until I dragged him to an empty room, a quiet place to talk away from the party.
We fought more, him mostly listening and me mostly yelling. But eventually Jeff rose from the thin mattress he was seated on, reminding me that he was a good foot taller than I am. He grabbed me with the hands he always did, the ones that cracked open twist-offs or shoved other men away from me or wrapped around my own to pull me through a crowd when I got lost, but this time, he gripped and shook my body like he hadn’t before. I closed my mouth and watched his face twist with unknown rage and then fall, his eyes widened, welling with tears, his face flushing a deeper shade of red than the lighting already made it. I felt exposed, rattled, his body hanging over me like a threat I always knew loomed. I was scared. It was too intimate a transgression, a clear violation that I could finally read. It was the least fun we had ever had together.
Women can’t be fun all the time, can’t drink without consequence. Frankly, few people can, but who feels the consequences of their otherwise harmless actions quite like women? People told me countless times how dangerous it is to be a woman and drink near men, how careful you have to be, how it’s your fault if you let something happen. Papa hates hearing stories about my alcohol consumption, certain that it speaks to my lack of safety away from him. Maybe he’s right. But I didn’t wrap his fingers around my arm, I didn’t rattle my own frame. I had moved out of my parents’ house years ago, but when I returned to my apartment later that night, and walked into my closet and closed the door—something I did as a kid when I got in trouble, a way to feel shame in private—I was homesick. I cried and wished my mother was in the other room, ready to run her long nails across my scalp to calm me down.
A week later, I stormed into his apartment with the key he had given me and took all the booze from his apartment—some of it not even his—and threw it in the dumpster outside his house. I threw the key at him and cried and he begged me to stop screaming and said he would try to be a better person. “I just need one more weekend,” he said. He wanted one more bender for his birthday.
I cut him out on the night of his twentieth.
It’s amazing what you can convince yourself of when you think everyone else is beneath you. I felt great during the first week of my cleanse. I wasn’t drunk, which meant I wouldn’t buy a nacho-poutine at three in the morning, drop it on my kitchen floor, and try to eat it before having to fight my cat for it. I was absorbing all my essential nutrients from my own inflated sense of superiority. “Want a glass of wine?” Hamhock asked that first Saturday. “No thanks, sweetheart,” I said, smiling demurely as I slipped into my luxurious weekend sweater-smock. “I’m trying to be kind to my body.” He sucked back half the bottle while I nursed a litre of Diet Coke and thought that, yes, this would be a good time to go raw vegan. I was doing great!
But when you start to feel morally superior, it’s natural to start thinking about people who don’t have your perseverance. People who don’t try as hard as you, people who are not as capable. People you’re still mad at for fucking up so royally. I quietly dedicated my first sober week of the year to thinking about how much better I was than Jeff. I’m doing it, why couldn’t you? As if getting sober was merely a case of mind over matter and the matter wasn’t an addictive and readily available substance, or wasn’t masking some deeper hurt he felt that he never let me see. Intellectually, I knew it wasn’t the same thing, self-servingly comparing my four weeks of abstinence to the trials of a struggling (possible) alcoholic, but try telling me that as I gleefully bought fresh organic vegetables and let them rot in the fridge while I licked cherry Fun Dip off my sticky fingers.
Your life’s greatest heartbreaks are so often your friends: dating isn’t always built for permanence, but friendship often is. You lose a lot of friends after university, more if you take an active stance against someone who used to be in the group. Worse is when those friendships are the ones you make when you move somewhere new and try on a new identity for a while, something that you think will fit better, will make people like you, and it still doesn’t work. After you shoot out into the world and build a community, and people leave, you feel the loneliest you’ve ever been in your life. The formula doesn’t work, and the people you think you’ll love forever when you’re eighteen and you’ve had too much to drink are rarely around when you need them. The University Friend exists in only one ecosystem, a relationship that requires the confines of a school, of a space in time where you are lost and digging for belonging, where your identity is so scattered you’re just happy to be loved. Drinking is fun, but it’s also the glue that holds you and your most tenuous connections together.
Jeff was more fun than me, so when we stopped speaking, plenty of other people stopped talking to me. Baby Braga and I watched our friends forget my birthday but never miss one of Jeff’s ragers, screen my texts but go for late-afternoon brunch at Jeff’s house, ignore us on New Year’s, Halloween, St. Patrick’s Day—the early-twenties holiday starter pack—to see him instead. When they heard about what had happened at the frat party, they asked me if I was sure, if I was drinking too, if I was maybe being too hard on him. Aren’t I typically hysterical, don’t I have tendencies towards dramatics? Baby Braga, meanwhile, came with me in the divorce, another untouchable by association. We didn’t host parties and we didn’t have fun follow us. I reminded them that their fun friend would eventually be thirty—old!—and his drinking would soon look less like a glamorous scene and more like an unfixable calamity. I reminded them how sad our little world was, but the ecosystem won out.
A year after I stopped going to the parties and stopped taking Jeff’s calls, Baby Braga invited me to his new apartment for mac ’n’ cheese and his preferred type of beer: bitter, hoppy, almost undrinkable, sure to send me into an inconsolable rage. (“This tastes like twigs!” I’ll say and he’ll say “I like it!” and I’ll ask “But why?” and he’ll say “Well, I’m sorry it’s not a gin and tonic” with this very precise derision where he extends all the vowels and raises his eyebrows above his glasses and then I will try to strangle him.)
“You know,” I told him, “we don’t hear from anyone anymore.”
“I know,” he said. “They all just disappeared. What happened?”
“I left.”
“I guess I did too.”
Baby Braga shovelled pasta shells filled with creamy cheese into a bowl for me while I started to cry on his couch, something I did all the time, almost every weekend, because I was alone.
“I don’t think you should feel bad about it,” he said, putting a warm bowl in my lap and handing me a napkin for my face and for the food I would inevitably spill on his couch. “I mean, I’m still around.”
The second weekend of Dry January, I came home on Friday night after a trying week of yet again aggressively emailing my editor, “You are such a fucking asshole,” intended for an unnecessary fight with Hamhock. I thought again about Jeff, this idiot who broke up our triad. I had a choice between dealing with his drunken memory bashing itself against the walls of my sober brain, or meeting Baby Braga for a drink at a nearby bar. I wanted to make it through the month sober, but I missed Jeff—even at his most destructive—like a dull ache I couldn’t soothe. I still take Braga with me almost everywhere I go, refusing to go through any significant life changes or emotional turmoil without his presence, but Jeff was our third. It had taken us years to recalibrate. When we left him for good, I considered it his punishment. He would be alone, karmic payback for the night he grabbed me. He’d understand that he didn’t deserve us. Maybe he’d feel so bad about it that one day he’d get his shit together and call me and we’d all try again. I was so angry, years later, again, angry like I was when he first rattled me with his paws, proof positive that there were no truly safe spaces.
I drained my fury by filling up with liquid poison. I’d made it sixteen days without a drink. While watching Braga force a pulled pork sandwich into his tiny rabbit mouth, I drank three beers in forty minutes and noticed, somehow for the first time, just how often I use alcohol to drown out regret.
The morning after I failed Dry January, I woke with a headache and my mouth like a desert, a hangover as punishment for fucking up my one sober month. I thought about emailing Jeff to say I was sorry for being so harsh, that I’d failed him, and that I hoped he was okay, whatever that means. I wanted to yell at him, too, blame him for hurting me and ruining our bubble, even if it was impossible to maintain forever. I knew his aggression wasn’t just about drinking but about something more primal in his brain, something that lashed out at a woman he said he loved. And yet, I felt guilty for not trying even harder than I already had. Maybe I abandoned him, maybe we abandoned him. I had been angry for myself for such a long time that I forgot to be sad for him.
But Baby Braga called me first, so instead, I listened to him chirp about ice skating and being at the grocery store, reminding me that today, like all days, wasn’t the day before. I didn’t ask about Jeff because it didn’t matter: that world was long dead and I missed it only in hindsight, where the things you lost clutter up your head on bad days. Braga and I dragged each other out of our old microcosm, enough of a victory for me. “What day is it?” he asked me. I could hear him crinkling a bag in the background while I restarted my process of shaking off the night before, pulling the covers off my head and taking a deep drink of water. “These bagels go bad in, like, seven days. I love bagels. They are my one true vice. It’s fine, I’ll buy them next week. Are you free this—ooh, Sriracha—are you free this week? Let’s hang out. We’ll get sandwiches and tea and catch up properly. It’ll be fun.”
Scaachi <sk@gmail.com>, April 30, 2013
my boss called me competent today
Papa <papa@gmail.com>, April 30, 2013
That warms the coccles of my heart.
Were his lips a bit curled when he said this. I do not trust anybody.