Kathryn, Michelle and Camila today. We met at noon. I don’t remember having any dreams last night, but I woke up feeling refreshed, as much as I could be.
I spent the whole morning sorting out the clothes I wanted to donate and hiding the pieces I’d need for the next season. I’ve been doing a deep clean. It entails disposing of empty haircare products from when I rocked an afro. The goal was to have the girls over for a movie, but things changed at the last minute. Our indefinite hangout session was now made definite. 3-ish hours. Kathryn had to take care of her grandparents later in the afternoon, so we tried making the most of today.
We started with grabbing a cup of coffee at Recreo while there was a Trick-or-Treating event happening in the neighborhood. Businesses were handing out candy on the Saturday before Friday’s Samhain. Kids in costumes and their parents to parade them. “Nothing scarier than the congregation of adults with their kids,” I said in the car. Call it a mild case of agoraphobia, or the reasonably hefty fear that public gatherings carry in a violent nation.
The coffeehouse smelled better than the taste of its export. I ordered a maple-something latte and it certainly would not pass the Starbucks test kitchen. Tasted bitter and burned with none of the sweetness I promised in my mid-size insulin dosage. Not even two sugar packets could cure my cup.
After coffee, food was next on the itinerary, so we stopped at a restaurant at the end of the block: Bread Thyme–West Roxbury’s newest Lebanese joint. Caffeine curbed my appetite for nosh and replaced it with open ears hungry for cold gossip. It was a good time, yet somehow I felt disconnected. I’ve been feeling like that for a while. Like my body and time move slow. Not like slo-motion. Just barely detectable. It’s like my brain telling me to savor these small moments with friends before the Shinkansen of a weekend is over.
I miss him sometimes, so I wrote to him in a notebook.
I’m scared of disrupting my life and moving again. What’ll happen to my friends? My sister? My newborn niece?
It’s necessary though. Being back home feels like the kind of comfortable someone should feel when they’ve given up. I think about giving up by mucking up the past, tucking the phantasm of happier days in the crawl space of my attic, which I’m almost done clearing by the way.
My latest goal is to upgrade my laptop. Every so often, I like to buy a shiny new gadget. It’s hard to be creative when I’m typing on old keys or it takes 800 milliseconds longer to open up a file. Creative whims come and go. I want to get better at a capturing them rather than turning to my phone to distract and suppress. My best thoughts happen in the shower. Can we get standing desks for showers? I’d get so much work done. Recently, I get these sudden bursts to be creative late at night. In limiting phone time before bed, I think I’ve tricked my mind into this precursory habit of wanting to make content in lieu of consuming it on social media. Even social media has begun to bore me.
A bored mind a creative one maketh.
This is a photo from last week that I keep looking back at. It’s the view from my office in Post Office Square. Something about the person crossing the street feels cartoonish. Like from a newspaper comic. It could be anyone. And they’re approaching the light source in a block surrounded by shadows made by the tall, corporate skyscrapers. The person has found an exit by way of crosswalk. Not jaywalking. Almost foolishly legal and safe. Nothing like New York.
After Bread Thyme, we went to Savers. I dropped off my donation, browsed the media and itched my way around the store. It was busy inside and I felt not one urge to convince myself of buying something with the 20% off coupon I got from my donation. The girls also walked out emptyhanded.
Next door was a Dollar Tree. We popped in. Kathryn was on the hunt for a pack of playing cards to use for her Halloween costume. I was a dog with a bone; a man on a mission. We only came up on themed packs, like Scooby Doo playing cards. When we couldn’t find a classic, non-IP deck, I suggested grabbing an açaí bowl at a strip mall that had a CVS. There, I knew we’d find a pack. And we did. It was so gratifying, I didn’t want an açaí bowl anymore. The victory was sweet enough.
JOHNNY PEGUERO 