self-story: It Didn't Wait, and Why Should It?

These days are so long I could drink a beer now and sober up with the sun still reminding me I'm metabolizing. 
That backpack has held so much.
It's crazy.

I asked for two cups, one with ice and one without. I waited a few minutes, then switched the ice from one to the other and poured my beer into the cold empty glass. This made me feel clever, effective, and secretively excellent.

Earlier I sat by a river that's been chewed out from below, tugged across itself more than once to fit different money's meanings and now it's pretty and where it is and there's a weeping willow behind enough grass that the willow looks like maybe it's dangerous.
I sat there and read, remembering only between chapters and at slow parts that I'm alive and that means I don't know anything.
A soft bending cord which was also a branch brushed my face, so I stopped reading but not because I remembered but because I am and that's very different.
On the leaf I held between fingers loosened suddenly from pages it took me seconds to realize that the tiny beatle was giving birth.
You know, birth in a patient way, the way egg-laying creatures can squeeze and push all for a life that right now is smooth, featureless, unrecognizable as "next" but might be next one day.
When maybe isn't maybe worth it, it's definitely everything.

I debated for 5 egg-lays if I should take a picture. I was confused because I had immediately wanted to do this; then when I decided that it was hollow and modern and therefore bad I had wanted to write about the egg-laying instead; then I decided that it was fucked up that all I could do while watching the violent honesty of egg-laying was to try to stop wanting to capture it and make it mine forever.

The tiny beetle made me sad. I was reading about love and women and mothers and jealousy and murder and broken-hearts and the foreverness of certain types of sad. That beetle worked. It would barely finish one impossibly long yellow egg before its butt found a new dot of leaf to establish sticky contact with and place the next maybe life just-exactly-so. Its diligence made me sad, like here this beetle was, giving its whole life simply to its task of maintaining eternity, and it didn't hate itself or its pregnancy or its decisions. I wanted to call it love. And this one thing that loved simply was going to walk away soon; the distance would be huge. There's a sweaty palmed closeness in our human families and so my heart broke wondering if the only way to hurt was to stay and the only way to love was to leave.


Now I feel safe and a little drunk at a table far from things too dangerously simple they might break my heart. It doesn't look like it to the other people here, but this is all I have. I can see my bike out the window and there is the bag for clothes, there is the bag for books. It's a funny feeling, to sit down next to a stranger at a cafe and let them see everything; the whole house piled against the table legs, the water botter is also the cup and the scarf is also the blanket. Maybe my sadness back at the tree came because of its easy potential for home; that could be it, my water bottle resting just so in the roots and everything already there so why do I keep leaving?


I bought a beer so I could make it make sense. This public life means that dropping 3 bucks makes me feel normal. Yeah, I'm a customer; I'm not sitting here for hours because it's inside and quiet and almost like a private sort of space and cause there is no other private space for me to go, this is as close as it gets. I wonder if the bags give me away, but I'm white and young and have a camera and they didn't even card me cause they already trusted me.


Back when I was at the willow I took out my camera, and by the time the lens had focused the tiny beetle had crawled completely out of the frame.

everything that existed at the moment of writing this.