5 am

Sunrise is at 7 am but I’m up at 5, contemplating existence in my uniform.

Ginger + Diva

I used to have an interesting lifestyle, let’s put it like that. My friends were Ginger and Diva. I’d drive out to Ginger’s in the morning, she lived in Draper and we’d go to Starbucks. Diva lived there at the time. She’d be plopped on the sofa with YouTube or reality TV shows blaring from the television.

We’d smoke weed all day and lounge around. This is when I didn’t have a job. Ginger truly took care of me. She took me under her wing. Now she’s got a baby and I’ve got a hash pipe and things are different. 

I’ll forever miss them, the way things were. 

I lived at Ginger’s, too, in her spare bedroom. I spent enough time there, enough to feel like I lived there. I got a chilling call from her one day in which she said her boyfriend Cory had overdosed and died in their bed. I knew Cory, too, of course.

In 2019, I threw a birthday party for myself and invited 10 people. No one came. Except Ginger and Cory, standing there in my building’s hallway, with a bottle of wine. At Cory’s outdoor funeral, I cried and cried.

Fog

I’m not used to the cold yet but you think I would be with the way you treated me.

The flashbacks I have include Jesse filming us kissing as the drone circles us from above in the parking lot at tech wall and then him overdosing in our bathtub.

When Phil drowned, I found out when I was with my friends at the water park, and the cruel irony of it all made me cry even harder.

When the summer ends, I always think about curling up under the neon red lights in my apartment at 5:00 pm when the sun has already set. I always think about working hard and about how life often includes doing things you don’t want to do. I wonder what the point of it all is, and even though I can’t figure that out, I trudge forward.