'Who doesn't want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float?'

-Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir by Nick Flynn

i woke up with a strange sense today, like a creeping crawling up my spine and nausea in the back of my brain. i felt uneasy in my queen sized bed piled with warm blankets and pillows, suspicious as i stepped into some flipflops and trudged across our redwood floors to draw the curtains open to the blinding light of day. i watched my movements as i swung open the refrigerator door and reached for a cold box of factory produced soymilk, processed with essential vitamins and minerals, and poured it into a mug. i tried to concentrate on the mug as it turned round in my lit microwave and tried to lose myself in its heat and steam while i sipped it. i booted up my computer and ran through my ritual, checking email, facebook, myspace, livejournal subscriptions... it would have been an average morning.

the soymilk hadn't satisfied my hunger. i found myself pulling the fridge door open again, and scanning it for something to eat. my hand reached for a brown plastic bag of whole grain bread. usually, my reaction would've included something about 300 million year old ferns trapped in the banal evil of water-tight packaging, but this time my thoughts were fixed on a spot a bit beyond the juices sitting on the top shelf. amid burgandy and purple liquids, in a sterile glowing white theatre, a television screen appeared. i watched it, mesmerized, as it advanced through fractured, saturated images, an informercial staticy after travelling through years of time. baked orange Earth hosts malnourished, large bellied children that forget to bat flies away from their faces//dark skinned mothers cry over infant bones in little bags of skin//five year old children hold up an empty bowl to me with a pained look in their sunken eyes//white-faced good christians ask me for pity, mercy, and help. i closed the fridge door i'd been hanging on to and popped brown slices of bread in my toaster. a girl's gotta eat.