Right molar straight cracked, root nerve exposed, but nonetheless out here mishing it to get that 2 a.m. donut hitter, chowing down on one side only.

Railing through pods, pit-stopping in parks, bundled up stumbling past muhfuckers KO’d on benches, on lawns, in the awning-ed storefronts on Wilshire.

And then, on the last night of my month of rest and relaxation.

The plan had been Go somewhere for a final fam meal, that served shit without the stuff the internet said to lay off of. Namely, processed carbs.

The ma and lil sis didn’t know about my nightly donut mishes.

That I was out here like a goddamn possum, scavenging for scraps while everyone else was shleep.

But the three of us mished it, down Wilshire, to this like raw-food-type Mexican spot, outskirts of downtown Santa Monica.

So we went to order, and they already had my meal decided for me. They were like Here, you’re gonna order the chicken asiago leafy goodness salad or whatever K?

I was like Yooooo—am I?

They were like Yeah. You are.

And look I was over here thinking, I got this night flight coming up, this finna be my last solid meal in a minute, I’m not about to order a bowl of leaves and then have to hit the Whole Foods bakery later, in secret, to merk an entire EBT-copped sourdough boule with a block of Kerrygold butter. Like I’d done, right before they closed, maybe three times this past week.

“I’m tryna fuck up this torta rn; so what I’m finna do, bruh, is fuck up this torta!”

All lil sis saw was me acting directly counter to how the reasonable consensus said I should.

Like I was so over it all that I was deliberately harming myself.

This bummed her out.

After a tense, silent meal, during which I indignantly ate my torta like I was enjoying it, like an asshole, lil sis couldn’t take it anymore and started crying.

“I just don’t understand why you won’t let us help you,” she said. “We just wanna help you get better, we don’t like seeing you like this. Why won’t you let us?”

Once, back in high school. Me a junior and lil sis a freshman. Back in the birth-city for my jiji’s funeral memorial weekend.

It was a Buddhist thing, you held the funeral, which was two-hours, chant-filled, open-casket—such a different, jarring sense of death’s physicality—followed by the cremation, the picking through of the bones, lined up on either side of the baking tray, with chopsticks, to be transferred—two sets of sticks to a bone, a move that, besides in this context, was completely taboo—into some Buddhist bone receptacle; and then, two years later, you had the memorial.