no matter how old you are, your shirt is still stained, and you still smile when eating a cinnamon muffin with your friends. your hands still unwrap the seran wrap gently, slowly, with no desire to rip it. the cinnamon and sugar still coat your lips. and you still ask your friend, “how are you doing?”. you look out into traffic and you remember feeling tired on the bus on the way home from work…you know, back when your mind tired your body. now your body, older and slower, tires your mind. so just like before, you give it tea and lick the cinnamon sugar off your fingers. and you tap your foot to the sound of the train and sometimes you just sit next to your friends saying nothing at all.
you have my grandpa’s eyes, you know? it reminds me of home. you remind me i don’t need to be scared of growing up, bc you’re probably loved like i love him. even if the days are quiet. even if you unwrap the seran wrap slowly. you are loved.
and the smell of chinese food (enticing, dangerous, delicious) still wafts up the street one direction, as the sound of the skateboarder bombing the hill cascades down the other.
“what you got today is my favorite here.”
“the morning bun?”
“yea.”
i guess it wasn’t a cinnamon muffin.
the woman next to him pulls her knit green sweater around her arms. tries, without much success, to wipe the dog hair off her backpack (the many things that never change with age).
the woman has a friend named robert. apparently his doctor said he needs to smell things, so she made a whole bunch of plastic containers full of scents. filled with cotton-soaked pads to “revitalize his senses”.
“he stopped being to smell…”
“how did that happen?!?!”
she was a teacher, and she said “teaches do these kinds of things”. she took one out to show the man with the stained shirt. one is peppermint, and she teaches him the difference of cotton balls and cotton pads.
the conversation lulled as we all listened to the train pass, and now the man is talking about ozempic and glp-1s…apparently people are losing their eyesight. “it’s important to use it in micro doses”, the woman replies. her friend from new mexico has been saying that for a while, apparently.
another guy sat down at the table - “it’s too good to be true, those kinds of things”, he says, “there’s always something”.
like the rest of them, he’s also wearing something soft. i supposed when you get older, it’s important to wear soft things. soft things and comfortable shoes.
and then i break and open instagram and there’s a post that says “i’m at the right place at the right time doing the right thing” and i feel like that is very true:
listening to neighbours talk about their muffins that aren’t muffins and their scents and articles on things that are “too good to be true”.
