My girlfriend of three years breaks up with me on the curb outside of Safeway. While she’s talking, an old lady dressed in purple comes biking by, and I stare at her so I don’t have to look anywhere else, and I think I will always think about this lady now, peddling down the street into the bright clear afternoon, when I think about endings. After my girlfriend is done breaking up with me, I drive her to Trader Joe’s to get a burrito—the Safeway prices are ruinous, and they’ve stopped allowing self-checkout, so you can’t even shoplift anymore. We drive in silence. In the girl, my carfriend is crying. Ha, I am thinking, ha, can’t girl her my callfriend anymore. At the Trader Joe’s, there is a display of a certain kind of delicious pancake mix that hasn't been stocked in nearly a year, and I cannot contain my delight. I buy three boxes. My cryfriend girls at the cash register while the cashier and I shoot the shit about the cherry trees blooming in the street outside, how the petals catch in the hair of every customer walking through the door. Look, says the cashier, you’ve got one, and they motion to my–no not mine not mine not mine not mine not mine not mine not mine–this other person, this relation I don’t yet have a word for, who reaches up a hand and pulls a floating pink circle from her hair.
Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey is a California transplant studying creative writing in Portland, Oregon. In their work, they are interested in exploring human-nature relation and deconstructing binaries that cast humankind in opposition to the natural world. Their writing appears or is forthcoming in publications such as SmokeLong Quarterly, JMWW, and Gone Lawn. They are a prose reader for VERDANT, a mediocre guitarist, an awe-inspiring procrastinator, and a truly terrible swimmer. They can be found on X/Instagram @esmepromise.
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