Yearning, faulty sockets, and the great big yarn ball of benevolence.

Your morning selection of tea.

I once sat in the bright green room of a girl named Chloe. Within a house nestled in the foothills of fields and forests, we played with dolls and spoke of horses, but her mouth of braces never asked me to spend an afternoon there again. Her mom Angie, a woman with chunky blonde highlights and a buff new husband, must have heard my little mouth say “shit.” I realize now Chloe was at her mom’s house, the one in the sticks, the isolated mc-mansion built on grated sand that made her feel alone. I think I was a little experiment to help her connect and while I can’t recall her last name for the life of me, I remember the uncut yellow hay fields of autumn that slapped at her glass pane windows.

I spent many years yearning to be baled myself. I was not a particularly sociable child, but I desperately wanted to be. I wanted friends. Friends. Friends. Girls like me who wanted to play in creeks and wear funny clothes and listen to our parent’s music like it was our own. I did have a friend like that, Hana, who now dates the boy I had an obsessive crush on in my youth. I think they are perfect together and I realize I never wanted to love him — I just wanted to be him. A boy with a flat chest, a nonchalance towards the world, and eyes with a film across that said, “Leave me be, I am tired.” I did always yearn to be friends with people who did not care for me, I see now. I think I understand why we are so tired.

It is exhausting keeping up with the rules of people, the rules of the world. Five light fixtures run separately when you plug a kettle in, and three of them stop to keep from smoking fires when you make your tea in the fight against electrical explosions. Isn’t it strange how someone with no engineering knowledge could make a system so arbitrary and bizarre, yet I sit here and unplug every appliance when the kettle runs so I don’t light my house on fire? Who runs these cords and makes these fixtures? Why can’t I just run the kettle without wondering when the plastic will begin to burn?

No one teaches you how to spot a relationship in the making, cultivate one, or maintain one. So instead, I keep up with the sockets in my house. Perhaps it would be easier to remove the sockets entirely and start from scratch. In my mind, the power runs through thick, tangled cords in my walls, like the great big yarn balls of benevolence that sit within us. I am unsure if that is how it all works but I know that it is the same ball in my chest that forms when something is not set behind the drywall. You know it too, right? A hunger to know what the fuck is going on? But you aren’t supposed to ask, you are just supposed to know, or to make it so, despite the years of training telling you to consider how you are making something out of nothing. Does anyone know when they are creating the something or the nothing, the smoke in the socket, the electrical explosion? Beats me. I’m just making tea.