What does your breakfast cereal say about you?

The coffee tasted like garbage here, but the room was mostly blank space, a disaffected gray tone of light jazz and chairs selected from a corporate catalog. And that's what I wanted anyway. It's part of the allure of a place like this, just how nothing can you be.

I wanted to be part of the problem now, which maybe that wasn't true but I'm saying it is. I wanted to be all the things she couldn't stand. Self portraits in the bathroom mirror, holding the camera off to the side like this. Lying to the customer service rep to get a well-deserved late fee waived. Black and Mild cigarettes. Mousy french girls playing ukelele on the internet and the people who love them. Corporate coffee. These were my new religion.

Because who knows better than the zeitgeist how I need to be loved? What were we doing anyway hiding out from the things like that, the ones we liked or the ones we were told to like so we liked. I could listen to vinyl if I wanted, buy a fixed gear bike. I could buy my vintage clothes new. That wouldn't be any more false than eating strawberries in the park while the wind blew leaves to the ground.

You strip away enough layers and all you've got left is peer pressure and cross-referenced marketing graphs, but still there's a security in making sure we're all paying attention to each other up and down the line. I couldn't say the same about the way my hand felt on the small of her back, since what's the value in a thing that's gone. I looked down at the table where somebody had scratched the words comforts are just denial, which I don't remember writing that but it was probably me.