i knew a surgeon and he once told me “nobodys insides look like how the textbooks say they will. you never know what you’re going to find in there once you open them up” and that was easily the most ominous thing anyone’s ever said to me
raccoons make no sense because they will leave your birdseed and garbage and garden and compost pile alone but they WILL open a barrel and pull out an empty 5 gallon gas canister and unscrew the lid and leave it in your yard and also untie the dog tether from your porch beam for no reason
one time I watched a raccoon pull up plastic tent stakes at a campground and just walk away, content with causing mischief
another time at camp I woke up to find a raccoon had grabbed the yarn that connected the string telephones my neighbor and I had strung up between our cabin windows and was just yanking on it… I grabbed one end and ended up in a tug-of-war over the string phone while this beefy raccoon pulled and pulled, hand over hand, making direct eye contact with me
and sometimes they’d sneak into cabins and just…. touch people while they slept
A person on the train I still think about was this woman a few years back–pre COVID. Maybe mid-late twenties. She was holding a wrapped present so tightly to her chest and was blushing. She would put the present in her lap and look at it, touching the ribbon gently with her fingers, then would hold it to herself again, just smiling so brightly. It was such an intimate snapshot of a person. She was so happy and excited. Fidgety but not nervous. It was such a genuinely joyful moment this woman could barely contain in public, and it stuck with me all this time later. It makes me wonder what moments in my life stuck with someone else that I had no idea would be ingrained in their minds. My guess would be the time I ate shit on a patch of ice outside the 7/11 and had to go in and the cashier pretended not to have seen.
I think mine would be the time I almost missed my stop on the last bus home and my brain switched to survival mode bc the next stop was in another town and I busted through the closing door, missed the curb, fell and skinned both my knees and elbows while my headphones unplugged (my phone survived the two metre skid on the sidewalk, my tender skin did not)
I don’t think I’ll ever forget staring at the ground on all fours while Cheerleader by OMI blasted from my speakers and roughly forty people just watched in complete silence
the bus driver even stopped and waited for me to get up which was very sweet but also it just gave more staring time to the passengers so I, in my endless misery and pain, just waved at him like he was an old pal or something and dartedinto the closest unlit street to immediately trip again
