Worry

by Alexandra Tanner

I can see the end of art and culture and sometimes even human life if I’ve been scrolling through the right pages for long enough. Sometimes I feel like my own ancestor. Sometimes I feel like a Tamagotchi.

Poppy heads to her room, though, before I can come up with anything else to say that’s clever or silly about abortion, or swag, or the two things in combination, or anything else that’s ever happened in the long, long history of the world.

“Yes,” Poppy says. “I mean, obviously my experience of you isn’t you, and your idea of yourself isn’t you, and the self isn’t something that can ever be described by anyone, but.”

If you are a corpse flower, you endure months and months of quiet nothing; then you’re here, you’re gorgeous, you smell like a dead animal, you are photographed by twenty-year-olds, you wither and die after one nothing day. It sounds to me like a life I’d like to live.