I miss sitting out at the bus stop and chain-smoking cheap cigarettes. My thoughts came out clearer back then. Nowadays it's all gotten too serious. I lived in an apartment where I didn't know a single other tenant's name, and the air conditioner didn't work all summer. I had no idea how to cook anything other than ramen and boiled eggs. We didn't have a dishwasher, so I stacked my dirty plates in the sink without scraping the food off of them first. For a while, I only used one side of the sink so I could still fill up my water bottle in the other. Eventually, the dirty side expanded and invaded the clean side; I still didn't wash a single dish. After a month or so of meticulous stacking and shuffling, the sink looked like a landfill from some dystopian nightmare movie where Earth's population is pushing 30 billion and everyone eats their meals off of plastic plates and drinks nothing but Diet Coke.

Soon after that, I ran out of plates, bowls, cups, forks, spoons, knives, pots, pans, and even colanders. I began to eat my meals exclusively out of takeout containers with plastic silverware, and I drank water out of my bathroom sink. That worked fine for a while, until one day I returned home from playing pickup basketball, still sweaty and red-faced, and noticed a peculiar smell coming from the kitchen. While the kitchen did, of course, smell awful already due to the Hoarders-level abomination in the sink, it was a manageable stench, one that you could get used to and learn to ignore. The air in the house wasn't equivalent to mustard gas yet. It was more like how it smells when you forget garbage day for a week. Definitely bad, but not bad enough to be too much of a concern.

This smell, the new one, was something to be concerned about. My first reaction was that one of my ghostly roommates had hung himself over the weekend and that his body had just decomposed. I was frozen for a split second. Thousands of thoughts raced through my head all at once.

"Is this my responsibility? I don't even know the guy's name!"

"If I call the police now, will I still be able to make it to trivia night at Loco's later?"

"I'd probably be the number-one suspect!"

"Holy fuck, this smells worse than I thought it would."

Without warning, I became unstuck and jolted into action. It was like my body got tired of my brain attempting to make the decisions here and took control of the whole situation. I walked briskly from the front door and towards my roommate's door, and just as I passed the kitchen, I felt something wet reach my sock. My body gave control back to my brain, and I looked down at my unexpectedly soaked foot. The floor was covered in about an inch of water. I looked to my left and caught the culprit red-handed, still at the scene of the crime. I had forgotten to turn the sink off all the way, and in my absence, the dripping faucet cut through the pile of dirty dishes like the roaring Colorado and the Grand Canyon, attempting to make its way to the drain. However, unlike the Colorado and the Grand Canyon, about two months of discarded food stood in the way of the dripping water's target.

I had no idea what to do next. I decided that my best course of action was to leave. I stopped the dripping faucet, for what it's worth, and headed right back out the same door I just came in from. I stood on my porch for a while and then lit a cigarette. For the first time in months, I seriously contemplated where I was and what I was doing. I had left behind every bit of security I had ever known, trusting that I could be my own protector. I seriously thought that I, above anyone else in my life, above my parents, grandparents, friends, and coworkers, had it all figured out.

I moved into that apartment on a whim. It was the first time I had ever been out on my own, and now all I had to show for it was a nicotine addiction and a kitchen full of floating cookware. I went back into the house and did my best to soak up all of the water. I filled trash bag after trash bag with dirty plates and half-eaten food. I cracked open the soap for the first time and cleaned the whole kitchen top to bottom.

Later that night I skipped out on trivia and cooked myself spaghetti for the first time. A few months after that, I left that place for good and moved across town. The other night, I was anxious enough to need to go for a drive and clear my thoughts. I didn't know where I was going or where I wanted to end up, but after a while, I found myself in the parking lot of my first apartment. From the street, I saw the window into the kitchen still adorned with the same cheap blinds I used my toothbrush to clean mold off of. For some reason, that made me feel a whole lot better.

I drove home and went to bed.