Refrigerated Major Watermelon Mountain Dew
It’s 9:53 AM.
You’re listening to Buzzwing by Pogo on your brand new Android. Next will come Toyz Noise by the same artist. Both are bizarrely good remixes of the Toy Story movies. That’s kind of Pogo’s whole thing, really. Well, not just Toy Story, more that he just really loves to make bizarrely good remixes of TV classics. Usually cartoons, which is fantastic because you absolutely hate live-action TV.
The wifi has really been cutting out today. That’s to be expected because this is your second year where you’ve spent your birthday in the pandemic. You turned the big twenty-one the summer after the pandemic started. You turned twenty-two just a few months ago and it was Pandemic Birthday Part Two: Electric Boogaloo. You also have bad wifi because you literally live in a college dorm in a college campus which is in the literal smack dab middle of an Evergreen forest. It’s legally considered a national park, and you live in the actually official 70s style concrete buildings in the center.
Right now there are guys with tools painting the entire outside wall of your third-floor bedroom window. There’s a big sheet of plastic or whatever covering your window. You haven’t been able to open it to ventilate your room in nearly a full week. It means that you haven’t been able to do your Hellenisitc rituals or smoke weed in your room for quite a bit of time now. Even if you do open your window, the room doesn’t ventilate. The whole place gets stuffy at night, but freezing cold the moment you attempt to change that.
You’re running on refrigerated Major Watermelon Mountain Dew from a dollar store pink water bottle. And only less than four hours of sleep. Last night you stayed up until past 4 AM so you could read 400+ pages of Problem Sleuth before going to bed. You actually ended up reading more than 600+ and finished the whole thing. Provided, Problem Sleuth isn’t a difficult read and it’s just one out of the many highly complex subplots of a certain 8000+ page avant-garde multimedia internet story about zodiac space trolls, but you’re in your twenties and you don’t give a shit if your interests are considered cringy anymore. Besides, you grew up having highly restricted internet access and just hadn’t been able to realistically finish Homestuck in high school, even though you dearly loved it even then.
You’re tired. There’s a Zoom class with choppy connection coming up. You’re in your last year of college. Your happy lamp is turned on. You have a full beard as well as perfect winged eyeliner and a psychedelic miniskirt. You’re drinking water at an appropriate amount for the first time in your life.
You’re tired but not unhappy.
You are living your wildest dreams.
Mercury-Marvin Sunderland (he/him) is a transgender autistic gay man with Borderline Personality Disorder. He's from Seattle and currently attends the Evergreen State College. He's been published by University of Amsterdam's Writer's Block, UC Davis' Open Ceilings, UC Riverside's Santa Ana River Review, UC Santa Barbara's Spectrum, and The New School's The Inquisitive Eater. His lifelong dream is to become the most banned author in human history. He's @RomanGodMercury on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.