We are laying on her bed, which is really more of a mattress than a bed, the kind of mattress that exists in apartments where nobody has quite given up but nobody is trying too hard either. There are makeup containers and random jewelry and hair accessories scattered everywhere. The ceiling has that popcorn texture they stopped making sometime in the 80’s and I’ve been staring at it long enough that it’s starting to look like a moon landscape or a face. Outside a dog is barking at something that isn’t there.
I ask her if she wants me to get cheese on my trip to the grocery store.
“Asians don’t digest cheese properly.”
“Really!?”
“Yeah, it’s a genetic trait.”
I think about this. I think about all the things the body refuses, and all the ways we are written before we arrive. I hand her my cigarette and she takes a hard drag and blows it out of the side of her mouth, expert and aloof. I watch the smoke curl and go thin and vanish into the popcorn ceiling like it was never anything at all.
“...but get some anyway….and some kimchi.”
There is something I love about a person who can contradict themselves without shame and with indifference to judgement—-it can be sexy until it’s not. She was watching one of those brain-dead shows about celebrities, their houses, and the square footage of their existential superiority.
“God, I hate rich people,” I say.
She doesn’t look at me. The television light dances across her face.
“The working class see money as pragmatic and vital for life and dignity whereas the wealthy see it as a number, an abstraction that isn’t tangible.”
I let that sit there between us. It seems true in the way that things seem true at this hour, in this cluttered room, in this shitty political climate.
“You’re sure full of wisdom today.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“I think it’s the vicodin.”
She finally looks at me then and there is something in her face I can’t quite name, amusement maybe, or tenderness, or just that particular tiredness of someone who has thought carefully about the world and found it mostly a drag. Or maybe she’s just stoned. The dog outside has stopped. Whatever it was barking at has gone away, or like I said earlier, was never really there.
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