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I think what I need now is a game of true or false. It could be virtually that simple, and that’s a phrase. That’s a real phrase. Real, virtual. Is this banal? I see it all the time. Bits of meat in the pie that you plan on regurgitating. Es que tengo tanto para decir. How could it reach you? Would it reach you to tell you that I need to move out of New York, and maybe I should come back when I’m 27, but maybe then I will be just as disturbed and frenetic in the brain as I am now? And maybe it would be even worse? Maybe it would reach you to say that there is always another place that will be better, because there are endless places? There are unfathomable circles drawn at basically any point in which a person can stand, and so the places that could be better are billions, trillions? They’re moving all the time and so they’re actually infinite? In their infinitude they are so unrecognizable that even the virtually simple question of true or false seems lamentably and utterly like everything, a sort of gargantuan everything that says hello only on the level of affect unless you can take it out to perception, to emotion, and to thought. You skipped dinner and went to drinks immediately, because you’re picnoleptic. Now you are facing an on-going incapacitation and neutralization of vision. You get in the uber and you throw up out the window on the side of the Honda Civic. Maybe you should, actually, estrange yourself from everyone around you because, actually, they don’t make much sense there at all? Because they are wrong in your life? Because your life is wrong? Because you’ve made countless decisions to make your life be so wrong? You’ve made them. You’ve made them by not making them. You’ve taken those long held desires and made them into signs, and now it is time to realize when your reading is actually a refraction. But that task seems so large and elliptical, and the circle in which I stand is very small. The circle has been small. The circle is my mother, who laughs at her TikToks in the passenger seat of the car when we’re driving back from the airport. Ha, ha. She is a good hugger. She is warm like a pillow. She answers my calls but she never calls me, or she does occasionally. We FaceTime and I watch her pop bubble wrap while we speak, so she only a few times looks at me in the face. That’s fine though because there’s never anything new to see. Es que tengo tanto para decir. I think she calls when she remembers her own mom. Would it reach you to say my mom could not be with her mom when she died? They were far apart, in fact. Now I wonder if my mom wonders if she should have left at all. If she hadn't left, maybe she wouldn’t be laughing at TikToks in the car when we’re driving back from the airport. But she doesn’t think it’s so bad. Many of the TikToks are about the top ten places to see when visiting x. I hold so much resentment for you. I wish all the things that you taught me were things I already knew. I wish I had something to teach you. I wish you would listen. I wish you would tell me what to do. You are the object of my despair. What is the object of my despair? Something true because it is false. Is this banal? Maybe what would reach you is a video edit of Rigby from Regular Show to Yung Lean, but that was my forte when I was thirteen, and I’m not as skilled in discernment now as I was then.

It’s not far from the apartment she’s been living in for four months now, which is just a hallway with five rooms attached like the arms of a starfish. The sun is low, it is close to seven in the evening. There are students with unintelligible accents flitting by, aiming for a good table at the pub trivia. She is marginally jealous of them and all the things they seem to have to do, but becomes preoccupied with the concern that her German roommate will be meandering in the kitchen later tonight, at the time she planned to eat the mochi.

She can’t just yet. A bar must be gone to, to say goodbye to a good friend. A good new friend, with a very straightforward name. This good friend moved with great conviction. Tomorrow she would be gone to a different place, and with her would go the past four months of life. The mochi woman felt that this was too soon, regretted her lack of immediate nostalgia. She had not been reflective recently. She exited experiences like one stumbles away from a rollercoaster, ineffably satisfied. There is always the subtle nagging that the satisfaction is misdirected but never enough impetus to make such a sensation grow into a question. The woman plays music through her refrigerator headphones.

Presently something is happening behind her. There are several vehicles parked on the side of the road on this very steep hill. They are sort of in her way, slightly up on the sidewalk to leave enough space in the center of the road. She maneuvers around them and is a few feet away from the bar’s entrance at last. Now there is a van with a loose emergency brake. It begins to roll. After several seconds of picking up speed, the van hits her from behind. She is motionless for the duration of the impact, but ends up in a very different and very exciting position. Lying laterally on the road now, her right leg is run over. She screams things like “Help!”, but not “Help me!”.

The mochi woman is enduring something unique. A number of things have violently departed from her. The headphones have flown off, landing twenty feet away but somehow still intact. That was culture. It could never encompass her in that very position at that very moment. Never. All her questions like; what is my essence; what is my ideology; what is my mentor; what is my reference; go to die. They have never felt what she is feeling, which is some sort of multifarious buzz. Multifarious bug. It’s crawling. It’s a tick. She is sort of like Emerson in the woods. Her life is suddenly for itself, not for a spectacle.

Her green journal goes too, with all of her attempts at documentation. That was her own self. One pancake face looming above her says something like, “Deary me! An American television star, with an eyebrow piercing!” This is an exciting statement that incites good thoughts for the study-abroad liberal arts student who is face down on the road. If she were to be dying, who would it be for? What she had been before was not a being-toward-death. She was a modern girl, all the time pointlessly current, she had not apprehended death. Now, her exact quality of mortality is irreplaceable. Who could she be dying for, if not herself, if not for the American television star, with an eyebrow piercing?

The mango mochi is the only thing that will not return to the same body. It is bleeding its luscious ice cream blood out onto the road. All the other items are scattered about, waiting for their turn to be attended to. She is also one of those items. A lovely, emphatic item. A painting, even. A renaissance painting referencing the crucifixion of Jesus. I am not Jesus, she is a painting of Jesus. The near-death experience becomes an utterly enviable slice of beautiful life, a moment of ecstatic repose. There is no inside to attend to, because there is no outside. There is only open space. Rims of a body no longer the mark of difference, now just a way to feel the asphalt. It is so warm. I am in a warm bed. I am falling asleep like an anonymous user at night, and I can’t hear the headphones twenty feet away still playing the song I had been listening to when I was hit, which is called Living Waters.