HEATHER

It was the saddest Christmas ever. Christmas, in jail. Christmas, during a pandemic. I started saying Christmas in jail like you would say Disney on ice. Christmas… In Jail! They severed us the same dinner we had on Thanksgiving, which was super salty turkey-chicken and cranberries, a roll, and green peas. I ate a lot of vegetables in jail. That was nice. I’m going to call him today, Heather said. Heather was talking about her husband that she stabbed during a psychotic break. They were super in love and I was rooting for them. I still am. Heather was this kick-ass chick with pastel green hair and eyes like a Disney princess. She was fat so I loved her even more. Plus, I had always wanted a friend named Heather. Such a cool name. Writing her out now it totally seems like I made her up, but I didn’t! She really is that cool. Like, she’s had people hold in their shit for her because they get so neurotic they pretend to not need to shit until they like absolutely have to. She just took out her poop from her pants and whatever and flung it at the toilet, telling me that she held in her shit for me!! I never asked her to do that!! She told me about one of her old bunkies. We had a solid schedule of sleeping in as last our bodies would let us and only waking up when we absolutely had to, or it was lunch time. Then we would use the sink (with hot water! We loved the hot water because they didn’t give it to us in H.O.H) and make coffee and talk about Jesus because they give you a lot of devotionals in jail. I got this really cool magazine about secret societies from Kristin Coates, though, and we put a picture of Tom Cruise on our door to greet everyone that would walk past it. She had called him. She was in tears. I put my dinner to the side on the table. What happened? I was sitting on the chair on the desk next to the bed. She had her tray of food on the bed, head in her arms, looking at the wall where we put a bunch of September 2020 Vogue (the Hope Issue) on as well as a bunch of yoga position print outs our counselors gave us. Indifferent. He says he feels indifferent to our marriage. She looked it up in her copy of Webster’s New Pocket Dictionary, which we often flung at the door because it never had the word we for looking for in it. It was almost magical. But it had the word indifferent. Marked by a lack of interest, enthusiasm, or concern for something : APATHETIC. Apathetic? We were born around the same time and spent most of our lives on the internet so we both got that song that goes “Mood: Apathetic” in our heads. So he’s just having his little emo boy phase. You’ll be fine. He’ll get a fear boner around you now. Published May 15th, 2021 on her Neutral Spaces blog.