6:50pm

So if you can’t do what you love, you survive. You pierce your ears above the bathroom sink and try to look anywhere but at the blood. Your daughter starts teething and you rip the earrings out again. They were a gift from your father but you always hated them. It serves you right, too. Doing what you love is without raise, without pull, so you take the plug from the drain and watch. You find yourself in cages made of gold that’s worth more than the girl in your house. She’s foreign like the walls and the rules you wrote on the mirror. You can’t believe you wrote those— you don’t believe any of it. You write a file of the things that break her teeth and export it into the trash. It’ll stay there forever and you’ll find it when you’re a decade older, but you still won’t find the humor in it. None of it makes any sense because living and surviving are synonyms and they’re not the same at all.

— ODH