07/22/2025 | tate-abrahamson | #from_life

I haven’t worn this shirt in months. But I put it on today. For some reason I put it on today. I have three plants in my room and four plants on my balcony. I water the outside plants every day, the inside ones need less water. They need less sunlight too, and less heat. So I keep them in my bedroom and sometimes I spray their leaves. Outside, I pick a couple dried leaves off otherwise thriving plants and watch branches stretch towards the sky and vines snake down towards the earth. My inside plants are kept on the highest shelves of my bookcase. That’s the only place my cat can’t fit, can’t go. So the plants are safe and so is she. Sweat drips down my forehead when I take care of my outside plants and a part of me soaks into a part of them and my shirt that I haven’t worn in months is stained with sweat. For some reason I sweat in it today. Everything was mundane today. I fed my cat, I watered my plants, I put on a t-shirt. But the ambulance visited my neighbors and they did not water their plants. The flowers on their balcony began to droop in the heat. Nothing was mundane. A dead eagle lies on the highway that takes you out of my city toward the coast. Today was not mundane. OZZY OSBOURNE PASSES ON AFTER COMPLETING FINAL TOUR reads a news headline. The sweat has dried on the t-shirt that for some reason I put on today. Osbourne’s face reflects off itself, my shirt to the news article, my inside plants to my outside plants. The eagle’s eye reflects the face of a man paid to scrape carcasses off highways that carry families to beaches. For him, today was nothing but mundane.

But it all feels very potent in the Southern heat.