They’re playing SZA’s CTRL in this coffeeshop, which is very topical to me right now. Last time I found out I was a guy’s side chick a little over a year ago, I listened to this album on repeat for months until it bled into my next sexual encounter—where it blasted from my speakers while Eyelash and I fucked in my Jeep Cherokee at 3 AM in, ironically, the parking lot of this same coffeeshop, in May of last year.

Eyelash and I would talk about things coming full circle a lot—and this is probably the fullest coincidental circle I have experienced, to the point that it feels like, you know, intentional on the part of the universe. I’m not sure if I believe that or not–that things happen for any reason other than by accident–but this feels very eerily close to something that could be a sign.

So I’ve been listening to SZA’s CTRL again a lot, for the same reason I listened to it endlessly one year ago. I’m reminded that things happen the way they do because they’re supposed to. I’ll take this as an indication that things were supposed to shake out this way.

So this album is probably one of my favorites of all time, if not in the first spot. I might write a longer piece on why I love it so much, maybe an ode. Maybe I’ll do a poem. If I ever made music, I would use this album as a north star.

The fact that this whole experience has made me write so much has made me mentally reassert my commitment to writing and art as the thing that will save me. Moral purity won’t save me (the same way it won’t save anybody), but honest expression and vulnerability through art might bring me close to salvation.

Either way, because I no longer have a bartending job and am no longer at my journalism internship, I have more time to write, and there’s little else productive I can think of myself doing, besides drawing or something. Everything happens for a reason, that’s what people say. I’m not sure if that’s something that’s just supposed to make you feel better or if it’s true.

HGF said she’d press charges on me if she tested positive for anything. I’m not sure if she can press charges on me exactly, since there wouldn’t exactly be a way to prove she got anything from me and not from him, and because I would have unknowingly passed on anything, when I think it would have to have been knowingly passed on. I understand the desire to be vindictive though. Last year, the Main Chick wanted to make confetti that said “liar” and “cheater” on it and stick it in the guy’s car air conditioning unit. She printed the confetti and everything, but we never ended up doing it.

I wonder what she’d think of me if I told her that, after all that hassle and that terrible experience, I did it again–this time knowing I was helping someone cheat. In a way, that previous experience primed me for this one. I just wanted something more normal, and I didn’t have the strength to leave. I still wouldn’t have, had I not told HGF.

There are a million ways this could’ve panned out–a million possible universes we could’ve descended into–and I guess this was the right one.

The future is unknowable and I need to heal.