That fateful morning I put down my plant, Alice the Aloe, and my coffee. I knocked three times, waited for the Witch’s booming “Enter,” picked up my things, and crossed into the heather-moss-and-dried-insect smell of my roomie’s bedroom. She knelt on the floor, her head under a violet shawl, reciting “The Hymn to Promote the Fecundity of the Fields.” The door to the backyard was open, the feeder swinging with birds. They loved the Witch’s honeyed insects, and she loved their shit.

The Witch paused and the unclean smoke of her room spooled around me.

Without moving her head, she said, “Note if there is any disturbance in the air today. We crossed under the light of the Worm Moon last night, a potent time when those wriggling creatures begin to wend their way through the cold earth.

“Blessed Bringers of Beatitude,” she howled scathingly, and I nodded as if I knew what she was talking about.

I passed through her room and stomped down the steps.

An empty packet of cigarettes had blown onto the grass-patched ground. The Witch kept crumbs, hairs, plastic strips that protect bottle seals, business-class envelopes, specialty bird shit, and other detritus for her spells. I was always trying to be a “good” roommate, and I forced myself to leave the white packet there. It would remain part of the tableau, along with the rose bushes, the apocalypse-gray condo across the way, an indifferent sky between tree branches, and the chainlink fence that someone had woven strips of plastic through, crude textile art that would soon be removed to go into some biennale.

I brushed construction Styrofoam off the stairs and made sure Alice was soaking up the early March sunlight. When I’d moved in, someone had left her (IDK why I gender her this way) in the dirt, not even buried, her roots exposed. Before I could take into account that I would be living in a windowless room in a Ridgewood apartment with two strangers, I’d gone to the hardware store to buy her a pot and some better soil and then walked her to the bathroom to get cleaned up. I started carrying her outside with me every morning to get some air. She soothed me if I got sunburned at the gay beach.

I sat down on a lawn chair, opened the app, picked up my coffee mug with FUTURE BUSINESS SCHOOL written in faded gold dust, and prepared for some Cali bullshit that would sink my bioaffective levels half a bar closer to depression.

The internet is just a low-grade representation of human consciousness, I reminded myself, and all those coding dendrites and coiled fiber-optic cables and locked web server catacombs are shittier versions of how trees talk to each other.

Why was I about to look at him if it made me miserable?