It Must Be Somewhere In Your Drafts

Sophie Nunberg

In front of my magnifying mirror, I’m exhuming massive blackheads. I cobble together a playlist of: mutual friends talking about you, podcasters talking about you, Fleetwood Mac. I want to know what happened.

I see your doppelgänger in Paris. It’s the espadrilles. Unkempt curls. I puke onto the roots of a tree.

While I barfed in that rest-stop bathroom with its red quarry tiles, its shower curtain door, you rubbed my back.

You would’ve explained everything in a snarky, pithy tweet. I ease up so my face won’t bleed. I’ve got this stainless steel extractor from Amazon that can get just about anything out of your pores.

We’ve all taken to Twitter to mourn. We cling to your quips, soothsaying subtweets. I don’t know if we even like each other. But I do know we love you, us chosen ones, literati, academics, austeres and misfits—despite, in spite of ourselves—we won’t disentangle. We can’t.

I start the playlist over. Blood drops off my eyebrow.

Sophie Nunberg is a fog-baby, born and raised in San Francisco. She lived in Boston, got a degree in Chicago, and worked at a start-up in New York before heading South to pursue her MFA at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. To contrast with her boisterous nature and corkscrew-pink curls, she writes about, as a friend put it, 'creeps.'