SKIMBS

Suddenly I am addicted to a sensible tee and other preparednesses to moderate fragility! Uh, yawn!

I was 19 when my mother told me it would be sensible—nay, essential!—to retire the crop top, immediately. But I turned 19 after moving back into my parents’ house, vegan for the wrong reasons and addicted to my Instagram story and making shitty beats on GarageBand (&brieflyairdryclaystopmotions) and pretending to be a man on my Snapchat story which I can’t really explain in this medium and walking for hours and hours and hours in Tennessee summer and being generally miserable. I could not that imagine anyone cared what I wore.

Maybe there is an age at which a sliver or an inch or three of my stomach is considered unseemly, but it was not the summer I turned 19. The crop top was going nowhere—the crop top was cheaper than ever before! The crop top was cheaper than when I was 13 and begged my mother, yes, that same one, to drive me half an hour to the CoolSpringsMallForever21 to pick out my first ever teeny tiny shirts that each cost less than a small black coffee, no, not today’s small black coffees, but the small black coffees of yore from when I was merely mocha-curious. The economics of both small black coffees and teeny tiny shirts have only become more dubious since! Environmental devastation is alive and well! Consumer guilt, so-so.

Nineteen was urgent, and I had bigger problems! I was smaller than I should’ve been and angrier than I should’ve been, and I felt the same about teeny tiny shirts as I did when I was 13. What an exciting opportunity, what a humiliating thing to want in the first place!

I am a person who looks ahead rather than directly downward. I am so worried I will be unhappy in five years and never entirely concerned if I am unhappy right now. I do not ever feel fragile as a person I spend an awful lot of time preparing for the possibility that fragility might yank me down, way down the line. I mostly avoid crop tops at 25, and I am mildly addicted to the Gap. I keep an emergency hammer in my car in case I forget how to drive on a bridge over troubled water.

PLEASE DON’T CONFRONT ME WITH MY FAILURES /
I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN THEM

Nico, “These Days,” duh

Does adulthood arrive through sensible purchases? Crucially, the Gap is constantly having sales, so often that I know, fundamentally, that I am being bamboozled by their manufactured urgency. And I know “family & friends” sales are bullshit. I just enjoy being included. But also crucially, I have coverage on my midriff now, and I have contingency plans! I have a master’s degree (not necessarily a more sensible purchase than a 100% cotton Gap shirt).

It might be a seasonal thing. Fall makes me wanna buy stupid shit. I’d like a tobacco candle, and I don’t even think about a cigarette too, too much. I’d like a heated blanket because the weighted ones make me feel weird and trapped.

Maybe I am now a person who thinks ahead! The Egyptians rubbed dangerous things into their skin hoping to outrun time. I am just using the healing ceramides of CeraVe! I’m not even afraid of hypothetical disaster. I am simply and moderately prepared. Look how well adjusted I appear! Look how hard I have worked to appear like this! You can’t even see my belly button anymore! I am 25! My contingencies are not superstitions!

My cardigan and my shoes match. My car is clean, vacuumed. There’s the little hammer for the goddamn bridge and the little blade to cut my seatbelt off. There are sensible mules in the trunk if I stumble across a beach. There are library books ready for return: Timbaland’s memoir (in which every chapter seems to involve either invention of the Greatest Song Ever Made from disparate robot noises saying “YEAH” or a complimentary passage describing the string synths on “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” which I, like Timbaland, believe to be one of the Greatest Songs Ever Made), the novella by the Swedish children’s author who also captures Floridian old people well because life is a circle, and a mystery I loved in middle school. I listen to the Grey’s Anatomy soundtrack in the fall.

[Tangentially, when I reference Grey’s Anatomy music, do you understand what I mean? Will they see us waving from such great heights, when everything looks perfect from far away? When I say that “he is not the sun,” do you understand the feeling? Have you taken the airport shuttle from the Sleep Inn on South Cicero twenty minutes to Midway with the stops, unable to change the Au Revoir Simone song that played after Izzy cut the LVAD wire, because you, too, are fighting the feeling?]

The season is changing, and I am not the only one feeling it. This is a childish thing I am trying to grow out of. The world is not just for me to notice when the wind cuts cold. My paycheck comes in the mail and that’s archaic, right?, and I live in the country, so it takes even longer, but I get paid just the same, and I think I will just pay my credit card this month instead of buying a sensible sweater because God almighty, I’ve got one for every day of the week.