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I get hungry for old food — I can’t help it. Cornbread becomes stale becomes stuffing. Wine. Kimchi. Rot and waiting and waiting and waiting. Getting negged at the sports bar. Getting my praise kink polished at the hobby shop. I have the inverse of a Hotel California problem, dragged out of everything I’ve ever touched kicking and screaming. I ask the guy shuffling cards at the end of the table — wobbling underneath us if either of us breathe wrong — what the difference is between a wraith and a regular ghost. He tells me wraiths don’t stick around for nearly as long after it’s time. He yanks the pull-down door from the ceiling and it doesn’t rattle me like it’s meant to, and while he’s propping the side door open with a mop, I tell him that when I grow up, I wanna be ephemeral. He tells me that’s nice. I spend my finest years brushing my fontanelle until I get tinnitus scraps of what you sound like. Of what a life lived intensely used to feel like before I had the language for it. I let you eat me alive in place of that language. The zip of a backpack. A laugh that creaks. Youth. Fear. A convergence that feels like nerves pulled taut. Something I can bite down on. A desensitization of the pulling that feels like forfeit. Somewhere between the sheetrock there’s a creaking-almost-moaning. When I started eating meat again, I devoured it with my hands. It’s not my fault if you taste like hell frozen over.
