There’s a Tupperware crisis in this country. You can make a grocery list of the substances in your body. Name brand Adderall and an SSRI 60 milligrams. Two fat burners because you want to eat a cinnamon roll with your coffee, the one with the orange rind icing. Creatine after working out, then marijuana for relaxing the neck, some fancy pants b-vitamins to be smarter, sharper, faster, stronger like an Ok Computer. Then down goes mushroom stems and ginger tea, down down deep inside you. And this whole time you thought writing about drugs made you a more serious artist, like in the movies when the princess makes a pact with the witch. Or the Devil. Let his lettuce, his fungus, his hard candy give me divine wisdom. Here’s to a blood oath.

You and your partner have been overfeeding the dog. You snuggle your face into her stomach when you’re stressed and call it “selfcare.” She takes it in like a sponge and she’s gained 4 pounds since her last vet visit. You’re partner jokes that your dog is a bear. This is her hibernating.

You’ll leave Chicago and move to New York, where you’ll trade a drill for a roll of electrical tape and wire strippers. You’ll run electric in homes new and old. Along the way, you’re told, there will be a customer who collects toasters, big ones, small ones, ones with president’s faces plastered on them that melt when they get too hot. But the toast is good.

You read a play recently in which the main character steals toasters from suburban households and you vow to never have a microwave because deep down you might be an antivaxxer, but this is a part of you that you never want to dig in to. You wonder what your partner might do. So you tell her you had a dream last night about toasters. They were nesting dolls and they never ended and you woke up sweaty and panting like a spent dog.

You fall in and out of love with yourself. Say it’s from the heart. Stick your face in your dog’s belly, she takes it all in and lets it in more and more and doesn’t asks for much herself. Your lungs sing like sycamores. Heart beating. Contracting veins, spider webs pumping. Hearing hundreds of apples falling to the ground.