we are all just visitors

In bed, my hair is long and wavy and smells like coconut perfume. My brown eyeliner is smudged from the wind. My green eyes, watery. My lips have a peptide treatment on that have made them the slightest bit swollen.

“How do you feel about oatmeal?” My manager asks.

“I love oatmeal.” I respond.

“Mr. Noodles. Tuna with quinoa. Oatmeal.” She lists off food at a dinner with co-workers. “I’m bringing you some food tomorrow. I was thinking about what you said the other day. About being hungry.”

—
On the walk home from dinner, I count how many repeating numbers I see. “777” “333” “555”. I wonder if they are speaking to me on purpose, or if they were all chosen by complete accident. The ones driving their cars, they needed a license plate number. Did they think repeating numbers would give them luck? Or am I being selfish, thinking that the universe chose to put me in front of these numbers? Was I just at the right place at the right time?

I walk by a man who is sitting on his front lawn, drinking a beer. Two martinis have made me numb to everything, and I stop to take a photo of a cherry blossom tree in front of him. He’s grumbling about something, and I choose to ignore him. But whatever it is that he’s grumbling about, I can probably understand the reasoning behind it.

It’s late at night, and the streetlight hangs between two of the blossom’s branches. I don’t know what it is that makes me pause. I think it’s the contrast between the night sky and the flowers. The dark and the light. Hope? My writer brain is trying to think of something that won’t become a cliché.

—

“The new tenants arrive June 1st. Ideally, if you could find a new spot before May 22nd - that would be great.” My landlord messages me.

“Let’s just say the 22nd then.” I have no leads. But I find comfort in the angel numbers that seem to follow.

—

I have never really found comfort in a man. In fact, I have never really known what I am looking for in a man, besides a confirmation of a pattern I know to be true.

“To no fault of your own, you do have a warped sense of safety.” My therapist tells me this a few months ago. I stare at her blankly.

But there’s a memory keeps coming back. Of my friend Lily, who introduced me to Jesse. We’re sitting at a dinner table in the spring of 2018, and she keeps repeating -

“And he promised me he wouldn’t do this. And he promised me he wouldn’t hurt you. After everything you had already gone through.”

I say nothing. It becomes easier to turn it off.

“I think he wanted to be better for you. I do. I just think he doesn’t know how.”

—

On the walk home from dinner, I think about many things. The cherry blossoms, for one. The promised impermanence of it all. I don’t know how long the blossoms last, but it never seems as long as I want it to be. I think about human things - like taxes. I think about how I get them done on time every year. I think about how I unclogged my own shower drain this morning. I think about the money that I had to spend on dinner, and that’s why my manager told me she was bringing me food tomorrow. I think about how I spent the last two afternoons with my friend and her baby, and I wondered in awe at how much she trusted another man to help sustain a life in this world.

“You know what I find comforting?”

I’m sitting at my friend’s apartment, a tea on my lap, with my legs draped over the ends of her pink sofa.

“What?” I ask her.

“How none of this is permanent. How we’re all just visitors, and we’re all just passing through.”