fragments, in no order, in and out of time.

***

but then you always knew exactly what you wanted to be, burvil says.

i’m watching an orange cat on an adjacent roof top stretching out in a patch of sunshine while another cat, a black one- who obviously likes the orange one more than the orange one likes it- tries to insinuate itself into the periphery of the spot of sunshine in which the orange cat is lying when i hear her say this. when she drops this revelation that i’ve always had my whole life figured out.

and i say, shut the front door. 

something i have never thought, much less said aloud, in my life and certainly not to my grandmother.

but it was inconceivable that there could be any amnesia regarding how completely clueless i have been about how i wanted my life to look, how it took me, like, DECADES to convince myself that what i write has value and that my life could and should be the strangely impossible wonderfully weird thing that it has become.

apparently burvil had this idea that everyone else knows what they’re doing with their lives and she’s the only one who made it up as she went along.

and i say, gran, gran, really, NO. remember how i was going to be a veterinarian because i wrote that on a blue star in fifth grade? i didn’t know what i was doing. i just kept doing it. 

i’m so relieved, she says, that you’re like me. 

and i think, i am too, burvil. i am too.