the bourgeois pig

and the beautiful ache

In the back room of a dark coffee shop in the sunniest part of Los Angeles, I let a man buy me a fancy coffee drink at 11pm. I let him grab my love handles every time he laughed, almost like punctuation. I let him think he had a chance.

He had bought me a memoir about someone traveling across the country. He said I’d like it, but that annoyed me because …