On the edge of the park, there is a little corner full of flowers. Little children are toddling through it, politely as quiet as the flowers, quieter than the traffic. They seem cleaner than the streets and smog I jogged through. A little boy's gaze gets caught in my eyelashes and I smile at him. He giggles the way the sun wiggles through the leaves. It is the closest thing to the sound of water. I put my fingers deep into the bushel of tiny waxy blossoms. They feel spongy. Other petals feel like over-rubbed velvet or the silky edge of a security blanket. The little boy is still watching me; it reminds me of taking care of my niece, Brianna, when she was a little girl. The little boy smiles again and stomps his feet, scuffing excitement.

I walk over the cobble stones. There is dirt in my sunblock and a couple achey spots. A bushel of tiny blue flowers, crop up out of the hydrangeas, irises, and what I think are snap dragons. The blossoms are miniscule. Standing in the early morning sunlight, no sleep yet, I watch five of the tiny blue blossoms disappear beneath my finger. They tickle. I remember how happy fragile things make me. 

At six-thirty this morning, I threw Freud’s highlighted, pen-marked, and scribbled on corpse on the floor. Orson Wells had marched off to another region of a generic Medieval empire, the Southland Cops had paused their drama, and I was done with the twentieth page of another paper—unedited, raw as road kill. Instead of going to sleep, I went for a four mile run. And now, for reasons unknown to myself, I am utterly awake. There are unwashed dishes, books, papers, and a few other signs of fatigue and finals.

            Still unable to sleep; it’s noon. The last two days of sleep are being beaten like eggs. I wish I had eggs in my refrigerator. But I don’t. I have almost nothing in my refrigerator but chocolates left over from my birthday, orange juice, guayava paste, and some pasta sauce. None of it is what I want. Nothing is what I want. In this freedom, I feel indulged.

            I’m laying across my bed with my feet on my wall—sideways because that is how I fit on my queen sized bed. I’m flipping through a copy of Beyond Good and Evil that smells like Nag Champa. It was from my old wood room, the one that looked like a bordello. I miss my dog. My feet look yellow, vellum. In this strange interstice of delta waves and waking, my skin is pretty and soft. It is slightly waxy, cool to the touch. The imperfections are fascinating. The damp of my hair is feels like moss. And right over my pelvic arch, I notice the slightness of my hands and how little my body is. I haven’t noticed this naked in a long time. It is not often you notice yourself. And not often that anyone else notices, even naked. I never like my hands, but there on the small puff of mound, my hand looks delicate. I notice the birthmarks. The small nails are regaining length, painted. I remember Melissa telling me she loved that I paint my nails when they are short because she thought it precocious. I had never thought about it at all.

            Outside, the green ivy undulates like an excited audience of frogs. I pull my teddy bear over my face. It is 12:20 now. I am still small and happy.

The multivitamins bottle reads, “Ultimate Woman”. Its “high
potency formula with Calcium, Folic Acid, Iron and Lutein” dwarfs a background
of crumpled paper, an empty bottle of iced tea, light potato chips indicative
of salt deprivation, and an impotent bottle of lube left from a vain attempt to
arouse me from sleep. Needless to say, I feel nothing like an Ultimate anything—least
of all an Ultimate Woman jacked on holistic healing. The white of the plastic
bothers me, seems gaudy, mocking, uncreative. The label’s font reminds me of my
father’s plastic-fabric super-short running shorts and terrycloth headbands in
the nineteen-eighties. The shorts were always offensive, drawing attention to
the testicles, making me ashamed of biological source material. I should be
more ashamed that I had to look up how to spell testicles. I kept spelling it
like tentacles without as many hard consonants. (I should probably look into
that if I ever dive into the murky inlets of psychotherapeutic snorkeling.) Back
to the more immanent importance of garishly boring vitamin bottles and the equally
poor aesthetics of eighties man-crotch: eighties man-crotch must have been in
part due to the forward-and-up positioning of the testicles by tighty-whities.
It was like the penis existed only as an afterthought, a slightly bigger
hardboiled egg tied in a tube sock and slung over a fence. Maybe they were
trying to save fabric and ease child labor by shrinking male crotch allotment. Alternatively,
there might be a historical pattern to the primariness of testicle or penis,
relaying some hidden discursive significance that ultimately pits sack and stick,
cod piece and procreative power pack, against one another. Maybe the Adderall,
pot of coffee, a stick of imitation crab, and a hostess mini-cupcake was a bad
buffet to demarcate the difference between last night and today. The problem
with healthier routes to the successful completion of tasks is captured on the
multivitamin label. In small blue letters, barely discernable from the label’s
dark blue background, just underneath the mocking and uncreative nomenclature,
are the words: sustained release. The brown bottle of tiny blue pills does not
say anything like that. It has lots of pretty cautions stuck on with pre-sticky
labels as an afterthought. An afterthought they know prescription pads and
desperation could give a shit about.