private cafe
She’s not alone in the living room. His energy requires some drowning out. She puts on some music to replicate a coffee shop feel. This is study hall. This is Saturday. This is feeling a bit claustrophobic.
My Girls by Animal Collective is a shockingly fun song to fuck to. A coffee shop isn’t a coffee shop if it doesn’t have a playlist in which My Girls certainly might appear but this choice produced a distracting laugh from both of us. I feel too close to [my boyfriend] to really let myself get into a writing zone. I just realized I’m clenching my stomach. Every time I’ve read this sentence so far (maybe five or six times) I’ve realized once again that I’ve been clenching, and so I’ve unclenched. Just realized again. Just unclenched again. And again. And again. Right now I’m making a grand effort to stay unclenched.
It doesn’t feel good in our bedroom at all. There’s a seizure inducing amount of windows open on the desktop computer and a mountain of clean laundry in the hamper right beside the desk chair at the foot of the unmade bed. I come back into the living room only this time I try sitting at the table facing the yellow couch he is sitting on, hoping that seeing him in the dead center of my vision will feel less discombobulating. His upper body starts to dance and he whistles along to a song we’ve fucked to many times during this pandemic. He whistles along.
I don't mean to seem like I
Care about material things
Like a social status
I just want
Four walls and adobe slats
For my girls
Nothing new is on my instagram except for newlyweds Eugene and Sofie. As I’m sitting down for take two at the [REDACTED #] Cafe [my boyfriend] says, “what’s up?”
“what?”
“you started yet?”
“yeah, have you?”
“yeah!”
When we were considering breaking up before the holidays [REDACTED B] suggested that we get a taste of what a break might be like by taking advantage of my parents empty apartment in Williamsburg. She said that potentially a bit of space during this time of sardine-like tendencies would go a long way. Both [my boyfriend] and I liked this idea and tried it once; enough time to realize that we were absolutely not going to be breaking up anytime soon.