What America Means To Me
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It’s about naming your dog after a kind of alcohol
It’s about wanting a gun but never actually getting one
It’s about having a stoplight turn red when you’re in a hurry and green when you need to check your phone and hearing the lane departure alarm beep over and over while you pick another song
It’s about taking three hours to transcribe a podcaster’s rant on wikiquote when you should be doing homework for the classes you’re taking to get your second degree
It’s about obsessively checking the same three websites over and over and over until one AM then hating your alarm at five thirty
It’s about fatty liver and gallstones
It’s about being desperate for the adoration of strangers while ignoring family
It’s about lingering guilt with a nebulous, unnameable source
It’s about feeling a terrible white hot rage over some minor inconvenience or perceived slight then telling yourself you’re a horrible person for feeling said rage after you’ve calmed down
It’s about sucking melted Reese’s peanut butter cups out of their wrappers because you left them in your car all afternoon and you want them now
it’s about telling no one any of this
It’s about adding lol to something you did not laugh at
It’s about wanting and not knowing why
It’s about needing but not knowing how to articulate it
it’s about seeing ads in your dreams
it’s about feeling a deep lasting familial bond with homer simpson but not talking to your sister for months
it’s about Disney remakes and realizing you don’t want a remake, you want the feeling you had the first time you watched the original
it’s about exercising but never losing weight
it’s about summers getting noticeably hotter
it’s about hating a particular celebrity because they’re everything you want to be but aren’t
it’s about fantasizing about stopping a mass shooting, or committing one
it’s about preferring porn to actual sex
it’s about seeing everyone you don’t know as a competitor who is not to be trusted
it’s about moving back in with your parents for the third time
it’s about being prescribed antidepressants you can’t just stop using or they’ll kill you
it’s about acute post-nut clarity
it’s about being repulsed by the accidental sight of yourself in the phone camera and fumbling to switch the camera to away view
it’s about wanting desperately to be showered with positive attention and knowing you’ll never get it and being slightly comforted by knowing that even if you did you’d still feel unfulfilled
