Self Portrait No. 1

Alena Coleman

If the aliens came today and picked me to save one thing on this 3rd rock it would be The Mountain Goats’ Jordan Lake Sessions. I run one hour seventeen minutes and twenty-three seconds just to see if I can still fill my lungs with strawberry preserves. Not a minute goes by in which I don’t think of you the used-to-be-you I would tell you to be yourself only a professor once told me that was the worst thing you could ever say to you. Professors can be pricks but so can I. I try to remember that I thought I would die and didn’t try not to put fishing wire around each tooth and tug tug tug try not to vomit a hundred tiny red plastic balls, what were those hippos so hungry for anyway? I think only, like, 1% of bananas are any good and I know it’s because of American imperialism but I still wish bananas were better. I like to chew chocolate. Sometimes I want to steal things then I remember the tobacco under my father’s fingernails and I do not. Once when I was 17 I was driving home and it was dark dark and I hit a dog and I moved it out of the road but after I washed my hands I did not feel bad at all at all at all and I know that makes me a horrible, rotten slug of a human being so I have never said it. I hope life still likes me. I hope life is still waiting for me to blow bubbles into her back.