Cooler than You: Stupid Things I Say and Do

As the leaves fall and seasons change, I’m home again. Home. There’s a familial concept often devoid of proper sustenance and sustainability in a world that is constantly evolving and changing your narrative without consent.  My dog and I walk, we sit in the sun, I write, he guards. The leaves fall as the concrete jungle echoes in the surround sound.   The past twenty-four months or so have been one hell of a ride. Palatable heartbreaks, unpalatable contentions, the loss of self and soul, the absence of ride or die truth sayers. The list certainly doesn’t stay static. About a year ago, my Dad said he had cancer. We had known for a few weeks before we told anyone. We knew. We thought it was lowkey, minor, just another blip on the radar. It was not. Last October, I received an award, and after FaceTiming my Dad, my friends said he looked sad. I couldn’t tell them then. I couldn’t tell them why I was crashing out that weekend. Less than a month later, urgent and emergent pla...

2020. What can’t be said about it? Well, for one, a sense of happiness. The losses of habits, community, and what we thought we needed are one thing. The loss of those we love is another. The first death happened, and I gasped. I kept it to myself and pressed on. When I told people, a few weeks later, the shock hit them . . . a shock for me per se. Mostly, though, there was no acknowledgment. I lost someone, one I had been seeing. On the westside, I moved uptown, and the space and beauty of an apartment were lost as the world froze. As I unpacked my kitchen and posted jokes in a thread about the ice cream truck outside my new place, one of my oldest and closest friends died. Died while we were jesting about the damned ice cream truck. Things that happened with that have stuck with me and soured me. I’ll never mail the letter I had written his wife when it happened, wishing her love and peace. More so, as she is still friends with my mother—of sorts, I guess—and when thin...