Living In America Raw · No Sign-up

The grocery store has 47 kinds of peanut butter but no fresh vegetables within five miles of your zip code. You eat frozen pizza in the car before driving home so you don’t have to cook. Your phone buzzes: a news alert about another school shooting, another climate record broken, another CEO making 300x your salary. You swipe it away. You have to be up at 5:30.

You wake up to the hum of the AC fighting 95-degree humidity or the radiator clanking in a studio you pay $1,800 for because it has "exposed brick." The coffee is burnt, but you drink it black because the oat milk latte is $7. You scroll past a GoFundMe for your coworker’s appendix surgery. living in america raw

And somehow, when the moon comes up over the power lines, you feel a strange love. Not for the flag. Not for the politicians. For the chaos. For the fact that you’re still here, still fighting, still broke but laughing at a meme at 2 a.m. with someone you love on a stained couch. The grocery store has 47 kinds of peanut

Friday night you sit on a cracked curb drinking a tallboy. The sky is orange from wildfire smoke or sunset — doesn’t matter. A neighbor blasts reggaeton. Another screams at their kid. Sirens wail three blocks over. You think: this is it. The grind. The dream. The raw fucking nerve of it all. You swipe it away