But we started fucking around on my bed, all excited. Till she tried to get on top and one of the bed slats from the shitty twin IKEA frame I’d found on the sidewalk during Penn Christmas last year slipped, and the whole mattress went poof.

Dropped down to the ground like a lowrider with hydraulics.

I started laughing bc this happened all the time. Bc I was a broke-boi fuck with a bed so shitty that this alone should have disqualified me from any and all forms of intimacy.

But she got really hurt by this, and didn’t believe me that it happened all the time.

She thought it was bc of her weight.

I told her No dude! It’s definitely not, still laughing.

But the mood was dead. She looked around at my closet-room like, I can’t.

Like You gotta come over to my house until you get a better bed.

A better room.

Then Ubered home, in tears.

•

Iced-out homie in a grey/yellow Adidas tracksuit, waiting for me when I pulled up.

Sorta purgatorial rando block, half of it ’bandos, north of Girard.

This was a cryptic flex, Postmating shoes.

Seeing him, I was glad I followed through with our contract. They were just shoes. And this, after all, was my job.

He was just tryna get drippy for the club.

In West the lines between the hood and where white folks lived were noticeable.

Traceable to specific streets.

I was just north of Haverford, for example.

Haverford the dividing line.

The outer barrier of the Penn/Drexel bike cops’ domain.

Where the amount of trash on sidewalks spiked suddenly.

Where consistent streetlights stopped.

But college students weren’t balling that hard.

The divide didn’t seem as distinct in West as it did where the drop-off was, north of Girard.

It went: Logan Square, up 22nd, past the Eastern State Penitentiary, all nice, homey houses up to where College did this lil one-way fishhook north. Then the last coffee shops on Girard. Before going abruptly hood north of that.

More menacing without the college buffer.

Houses in the pre-hood part elevated, set back.

They seemed more vulnerable. They so blatantly had things to take.

So long as you could hold your own, the safer move was to live in the hood.

To stay in the hood.

To never have anything to take.

4

EX BAE

June 2018

Ex bae texted me a pic of the cutest lil black Lab.

With the caption Doesn’t he look like your aunt and uncle’s dog Casey we housesat that once we housesat?

Heart beating, palms wet, vision blurring, reading this.

What the fuck.

What was happening.

It was Thursday night.

I’d gleaned, from a previous check-in, that Z, her new boo, taught in NYC Tues–Friday.

Late week loneliness? An isolated lapse? Or something bigger.

Who were we kidding. Had to be something bigger.