places where i have dissociated

“Lougheed Mall, Burnaby, BC”
The light is annihilating and the signs are all wrong. I am not quite
delirious, but I am sweating enough that my skin chafes on muscle, and I
don't know where to turn. I found an ATM but now I have to break the notes.
The skeleton of the mall is white and unforgiving; when I look around, it
hurts behind my eyes. I have to break the notes or I can't do laundry, and I
have to do laundry or — what? I don't know why I have to do laundry. There's
a closing-down sale in a store selling mostly anime tat, video-game
memorabilia, hundreds of tiny Pokémon on keychains and towels. It is darker
in the store and so I walk around forever, orbiting a purchase like a slow
and lifeless moon. I am lightheaded and otherworldly and my socks are
slouching down into my boots. I have to do laundry or what was the day even
for? I buy my sister a Totoro keyring; she loves Totoro, loves what's
useless, against all reason loves me. I remember these things from eight
hours in her past, sick and alone in post-festive suburbia. The cashier at
the store gives me handfuls of change and I stash it in my coat pocket,
stones to weigh me down and drown me in the snow. I have to get home and
sleep because I promised to see you later. I have to do laundry because
something needs to be right. Something in my life needs to be clean and warm
and safe, and it isn't you, and it isn't me, so it stands to reason that it
has to be my clothes. I drag the weight of my body back across the parking
lot, into the elevator, into an apartment that doesn’t belong to me. I drag
my bag of clothes out of the apartment, into the elevator, into a machine
that drinks in all the coins I have. When I crawl back into bed I see a
message from you, waiting. There is a washing machine at your dad's house. I
didn't have to go out while I was sick. The world outside my window is a
haze of falling snow, and I don't know how to tell you: I did, I can't
explain it, but I did.
waverly sm