Give me the sticky floor of a dive bar. Give me the mystery stain on the bus seat. Give me the gummy residue on a library book cover. That’s texture. That’s history.
My POV is a cracked lens. A greasy thumbprint smeared across the camera of the world. When I look at your white tablecloth, I don’t see elegance. I see the last hundred sweaty palms that touched it before the busboy wiped it down with a rag he hasn't washed in three shifts. When I shake your hand, I’m not feeling a greeting. I’m feeling the dead skin cells flaking off your knuckles, the microscopic mites nesting in your cuticles, the ghost of the bathroom door handle you didn’t wash after. filthy pov
My apartment smells like victory—if victory is stale beer soaked into carpet and the metallic tang of a radiator leaking rust. I don’t own a sponge. I own a crusted-over dish brush that I use for everything: scrubbing the bathtub ring, scraping the burnt eggs off the pan, and occasionally scratching my back. The line between clean and dirty died in this apartment six years ago, and I didn't go to the funeral. Give me the sticky floor of a dive bar
I lick my finger to turn the page.
When I look at a beautiful woman, I don’t see her gloss. I see the sebum clogging her pores. I wonder if the shine on her cheek is highlighter or the natural grease of a long day. I wonder if her perfect ponytail is hiding a patch of psoriasis. And I love her more for it. Because the alternative—the plastic, airbrushed, sterile version of life—is a horror movie. That’s texture
It’s the only way to live without going crazy.
Your world of sanitizer and “fresh scent” is the real lie. You spray Febreze on a sofa that has absorbed the farts of a thousand Netflix marathons, and you call it “fresh.” I call it perfume on a corpse. I prefer my filth raw. I like the way my pillowcase smells like my own sour saliva from last night. I like the grit under my fingernails because it’s a record of where I’ve been—the crumbling brick I touched on the walk home, the change from the vending machine, the soil from the cracked pot where my dead fern used to live.