The grocery store has 47 kinds of peanut butter but no fresh vegetables within five miles of your zip code. You eat frozen pizza in the car before driving home so you don’t have to cook. Your phone buzzes: a news alert about another school shooting, another climate record broken, another CEO making 300x your salary. You swipe it away. You have to be up at 5:30.
You drive past a strip mall with a dentist, a vape shop, a dollar store, and a church in the same plaza. A guy is yelling at a lamppost about the FBI. Nobody looks. That’s the real code: keep moving, don’t engage, protect your energy. living in america raw
That’s America. Glorious. Brutal. Unmedicated. And somehow, still moving. The grocery store has 47 kinds of peanut
And somehow, when the moon comes up over the power lines, you feel a strange love. Not for the flag. Not for the politicians. For the chaos. For the fact that you’re still here, still fighting, still broke but laughing at a meme at 2 a.m. with someone you love on a stained couch. You swipe it away
You wake up to the hum of the AC fighting 95-degree humidity or the radiator clanking in a studio you pay $1,800 for because it has "exposed brick." The coffee is burnt, but you drink it black because the oat milk latte is $7. You scroll past a GoFundMe for your coworker’s appendix surgery.
At work, you’re expected to reply to Slack messages at 10 p.m. because “we’re a family.” Your boss talks about mental health awareness while denying your PTO. You smile. You cash the check. Half of it goes to health insurance you’re terrified to use because the deductible is a used Honda Civic.