ears full of pounding rain and a heart thriving off furious spanish, rolling words with a beat running akimbo like wild horses towards a cliff, a pace not even the most skillful drummer could follow—this is the agony of keeping a mild face.

on a monday sick day, i can listen to musicbox piano ballads with "goodbye" in the title and look up every rhyming latin word ending in "-ita". my future is laid out before me in irreversible bad habits and crumpled shirts that aren't mine. i've stopped smoking cigarettes entirely but there's so much more weed than before, i sat in the theatre room with roberts for three whole hours saturday night, singing rounds and rounds of some 80s song i do not remember and then the opening theme to "doug" a capella.

i like to pretend that on these lazy days, the whole city shuffles around with me, in checked pajama pants, holding thick mugs of breakfast coffee. we all link hands through the streets and stop traffic, getting lost in swedish peaches, drowning an entire population with an ocean of sweet juice that pours from every tear of helpless fuzzy skin.

my grandma expects new photos from the grandaughter she sees once every few years but her collection seems pretty finished to me, a whole slew of changing male features next to mine, a new one every visit, an old one by the time i leave.

there were fifty-something kids the weekend ago, filling an entire senecent manor of abandoned rooms and cheesecake platters like starving comorants. my entire senior year is teaching me to just simply give up, but i've made a promise to myself to dream big dreams again at north avenue, in three months, in seventy-eight days.

you woke up at 4:04am, cambridge-atlanta time, to tell me, "i sure do miss you."

come home then.