All Grown Up

There is no sleep of the innocent anymore, I think again as she shuts the door. I fold myself up into a ball and hold myself tightly. My own flesh, my own comfort, mine.

You go home that night and draw the Empire State Building and you feel hopeful doing this thing you love to do, so hopeful you look up online what tonight’s colors mean—the lights are green and blue—and find out it’s in honor of National Eating Disorders Day and you get depressed all over again even though you’ve never had an eating disorder in your life.

It’s not that you want a baby, or want to get married, or any of it. It’s not your bag. You just feel tired for some reason. Tired of the world. Tired of trying to fit in where you don’t.

There are men also, in your bed, in your world, foggily, but you are less interested in them than in muffling the voice in your head that says you are doing absolutely nothing with your life, that you are a child, that the accoutrements of adulthood are bullshit, they don’t mean a goddamn thing, and you are trapped between one place and another and you always will be unless something forces you to change. And also, you miss making art.

This is a thing we could do for each other. Here, at last, is the way to make this work.

can’t stand when a meal is ruined. I have slept with many men, don’t ask me their names, but I can’t eat anything casually.