Can you believe it: I used to stay up past eleven. I could sleep like a drawer of clean socks. Wait until noon to eat my assortment of suspicious fruits. The sky was a moldy cabbage. We talked on things connected to walls, had brief dreams about swings. The kids in the park threw sliced bread at anything that moved, including the wind. I swear the water lapped right up to the grass, so if you were distracted by a book you’d get wet really fast. Because of the lake. And we spoke so infrequently about generations, though I knew mine was renowned for its hard living, which I took to be a difficulty, such as the way every drug mart store had a separate job application with subtle differences, so you had to rewrite it every time you applied. I had a midnight shift selling gin. I was eighteen with a red crew neck under my polyester vest. We were allowed no embellishments. The other day I stopped by a drug mart and the cashier had a leather vest with fringe and a unicorn in sequins on the back. That job involved too much math. The sky was an obnoxiously long receipt with too few items. I wanted to tear it in half.