I was standing in the grocery store trying to decide whether I could afford cereal when an old man walked up beside me. He looked at my cart. Then he looked at me. Then he said, “Put the cereal back.” I thought he was joking. “I beg your pardon?” “Put it back.” I laughed. He didn't. “You're trying to save money, aren't you?” I nodded. “Then don't spend money just because you're tired.” That sentence hit me harder than it should have. I put the cereal back. The man smiled and walked away. A few minutes later, I reached the checkout. The cashier scanned my groceries. Then she said, “Someone already paid.” I looked around. The old man was standing near the entrance. I ran after him. “Sir! You paid for my groceries?” He shrugged. “You needed them.” I tried to give him the money. He refused. Then he said something I'll never forget. “When I was your age, someone helped me. I promised myself I'd do the same whenever I could.” I asked him who had helped him. He smiled. “My wife.” He pulled an old photograph from his wallet. It was a picture of a young woman standing outside a grocery store. I looked at it. Then I looked at the store. It was the same store we were standing in. He told me she'd passed away years earlier. But before she died, she made him promise that he'd never stop helping people. “So I don't,” he said. I thanked him and went home. A few weeks later, I was back at the same grocery store. I saw a teenager standing in front of the cereal aisle, staring at the prices. I remembered the old man. So I bought the cereal for him. He looked shocked. “You don't have to do that.” I smiled. “I know.” And as I walked away, I realized something. The old man hadn't really bought me groceries. He'd passed something on. And now it was my turn.

i am holding hands with a girl at the pet store. i love how her voice changes when she speaks to different animals. round and bubbly for the angelfish, high and breathy for the calico kittens, sonorous and slithery for the python. she loves them all, even the great hairy tarantula that makes me cringe. i am holding hands with this girl whose halo of hair glows banana yellow under the heat lamps in the reptile section, who offers her index finger to teething kittens. she asks “can’t we have one?” in the voice she uses for only me. a voice i can’t describe without using her name, but i imagine joan of arc heard something similar the day she picked up a sword. she is still holding my hand, and i feel like i’d sink into cartoon quicksand if i let go. so i don’t. “are you two… together?” this is not unfamiliar, but the woman’s voice, the voice she has chosen, is angrily acidic. this woman has laced her tone with arsenic, without even a passive aggressive teaspoon of sugar to hide her poison. she inhales, puffing herself up like a frightened lizard before her final words. “there are children here, you know.” in the future, i think of a thousand things to say. we were children too. two girls holding hands after school. two girls holding hands at the movie theatre, two girls in a booth at tony’s pizza, two girls sharing awkward first kisses after two solo cups of wine in someone else’s backyard. two girls holding kittens at a pet store on a saturday afternoon. i know now that they see us through funhouse mirrors: distorted, disturbed, our monstrous bodies taking too much space, spoiling innocent spaces with our imposing sexualities. our innocence never ours to begin with. even with this, there is nowhere i would rather be than holding hands with her in a pet store, with her voice like rain on a hot day, her peach lips blowing kisses for fish, her grip tightening as if to say “i dare you to take this away from me.”

A newly wed husband decided to ask his wife about her past relationships. He nervously asked how many men she had been with, but she just stared silently at the ceiling. He tried again, reassuring her that he wasn’t judging and simply wanted them to be honest with each other. Still nothing. Feeling guilty, he apologized and told her he never meant to upset her. He tried comforting her with affection, but she remained completely silent. Finally, she turned to him and said: “Seriously? You’ve made me lose count!” 😭😂

My boss doesn’t take me seriously because I’m the youngest in the office by a decade and spend most of my time making his life hell (unrelated problems). Yesterday he asked me to help him with a problem with a program we use but wasn’t actually listening to me when I tried to help, so it wasn’t working. He asked who the expert on this program was in our office and I told him it was me. He asked who the expert was within the organisation and I told him it was me. He sent me out of his office saying he would call IT to fix it. So I very patiently went back to my desk, where my phone rang a minute later, with IT asking me to help someone who had a problem with the program. The sheer unadulterated joy I felt making direct eye contact with my manager through the glass wall of his office whilst I answered his phone call will fuel me for WEEKS.