Today you are eating cold pizza out of a grocery bag.  Not a Zip Lock bag, a grocery bag that you had to pay five cents for because you forgot your re-useable bags at home last week.  You also forgot to shower last night, but you put on extra deodorant this morning, and you’re hoping no one will notice, or was that yesterday morning?  Has it been two days without showering and did you even put on deodorant this morning?

The woman beside you on the streetcar has lobsters instead of hands, and each lobster has its own aquarium.  The sound of the water bubbling makes you have to pee and you’re wondering if she’s judging you for eating cold pizza out of a grocery bag at eight in the morning.  She must have her own problems though, so you think you’re probably safe.

It’s days like this that remind you of that day in grade eleven.  You were sixteen, and you started crying for no reason, and you couldn’t stop.  It was early.  You had gotten ready for school.  You were waiting for your dad to drive you, and then you were crying.  You cried so hard you almost threw up, and you didn’t have to go to school.  Sometimes, you’re sure that that day you stayed home was the day all the other kids were told what it would be like and what to do.  You’ve lived on your own for seven years now, and you still feel shockingly unprepared like one day you will be caught in the rain and simply dissolve.

The woman with the lobster hands is half asleep beside you and her lobsters bob in their aquariums as the streetcar stops at the next set of lights.

You wonder what you’re doing here, not here as in the streetcar, but the existential here, as in why? And you wonder if you’ll start spontaneously bleeding from your neck.  Last week on the streetcar, a man shot blood across half the passengers.  Is it bad you were a little jealous of all the attention he got?  He was at the front of the streetcar and you were at the back.  You didn’t even get hit, and now you’re here again today, eating cold pizza out of a grocery bag and waiting.