in the car he said ‘i just had a bad day at the library. you had a good day.’ i said ‘yeah but i didn’t actually do anything like, important, that i said i’d do. what are the actual things that are making you feel bad right now?’ he expressed a vague sense of unrest and underlying futility about a lack of motivation to do anything creative, let alone life’s more practical daily demands, managed easily by others. he asked why i felt bad. i was surprised he asked, in a way that distracted me from answering the question.

i said something like ‘worried about my future, sad about now, i don’t have anything to look forward to anymore.’ he said ‘i don’t even get the concept of ‘looking forward to’ anymore, like, what will happen? it’s just temporary comforting things until the inevitable thing.’ i said ‘yeah, that’s what i mean by ‘nothing to look forward to.”

parked by our apartment. seemed hard to exit, to want to go inside. the car in front of us had a funny permanent-looking ‘for sale’ decal on the back window, like ‘for sale’ almost in cursive. i turned off the car. it was quiet. i said ‘we have to go inside now.’ he said ‘do we?’ i leaned over and hugged him. he said ‘a hug is just like, being outbid on ebay.’

inside we seemed to feel worse and worse, saying things to each other that indicated vaguely, some kind of hopelessness. in the kitchen i hugged him from behind and said ‘now your back will be warm.’ he said ‘i’m being outbid on ebay.’

i opened the fridge door. there’s a watermelon in there that’s been there for months, i think. seemingly months. it’s what has been smelling bad about the kitchen. earlier one of us had said we thought the watermelon was what’s been making the kitchen smell bad. i said ‘i want to throw it out the window.’ ex-boyfriend said ‘like where i threw up’ (before the library, he had shown me that he vomited macaroni and cheese out the bedroom window onto part of our roof—the apartment is such that…we have two floors, kind of. there is an area where you can vomit out the window and it will land on our roof).

i said ‘no, like, right out here, throw it out this window.’ he said ‘we can’t do that.’ he said ‘should we take it to the park?’ i grinned and said ‘yeah.’ Somehow…we became committed to this. taking the watermelon somewhere. he said ‘here, put it in this shitty bag,’ and handed me an urban outfitters tote bag. he said ‘was that…did that come with like, a thirty dollar purchase or something?’ i kneeled by the fridge and said ‘no, fuck, i don’t know,’ breathing through my mouth to avoid the rotten smell. holding a whiskey bottle, he said ‘i’m bringing this, so we can have a toast, after we throw it. toast it after we throw it.’ he placed the whiskey in a plastic bag. i said ‘yeah, yeah, good idea.’ i stood and held the bag. he said ‘what park should we take it to?’ i felt a new kind of energy in the space between my eyes and his. i said ‘penn treaty?’ he said ‘yeah, penn treaty, good. i’m feeling better already.’ i said ‘me too.’