Self-Portrait with My Shoebill Friend as We Rebrand Spirituality

This time, Janice is wearing a priest collar and I’m the altar. She hisses when I open my Notes app during communion, calls me a heretic for spellchecking my trauma. I tell her my whole personality is based on being misquoted. She says no, babe. It’s based on needing a witness and a warning sign. Then she bites the rim off my coffee cup and whispers the true name of God into the ear of a raccoon I once dated. She reads tarot using expired CVS receipts. All the cards say return to sender. I ask if that means my father. She just shrugs and duct-tapes a feather to my forehead like it’s penance or war paint or both. We co-author a manifesto on a napkin stolen from a dive bar bathroom. She titles it Why We Don’t Cry During Apocalypse Drills Anymore. Later, I catch her sobbing to a podcast about deep-sea fish that flash their own bodies just to be noticed. I ask if she’s okay. She croaks, do you even know what it’s like to be evolution’s punchline. Yes, Janice. I call it middle school. I call it dating men with lowercase ambitions. I call it standing too long in the same place and becoming part of the furniture. By the time the sun decides to ghost us for good, Janice is already skywriting with the last of my mascara: don’t wait for closure— just close the damn door. I laugh like I mean it. She screams like she doesn’t. We steal a shopping cart, fill it with unsent letters and beef jerky, and ride it downhill into the end of everything. I am finally the bird. She is finally the girl. And God God is just someone we unfollowed after a bad take on grief.