The cafe at the end of my street roasts whole beans in small batches until they are extremely dark, almost black. The owner picks through the wide shallow metal pans on which he cools the beans, collecting the misshapen or burnt ones, which he transfers to small dishes to set at the center of the six small two-seaters scattered around the shop. The dishes of deformed beans make for good conversation, I think, and even when I am there alone they are something to look at. I once asked the owner if he thought that the patterns of the beans could be used to tell one’s future, and it made him laugh, but I try it sometimes, and the results are not inconclusive. This morning the dish at my table was less full than normal, and contained a few stunted beans with strange protrusions and pitted skin, their ends burnt and their glossy middle-seams crooked and evil. It didn’t bode well. The coffee at the cafe is extremely dark and bitter and served in small white Western style tea cups with blue lips. It makes me anxious and perceptive, and prevents me from getting a headache in the afternoons. The owner plays soft smooth jazz in the cafe during the mornings, and I see many of the same customers, though most do not sit down, carrying their small brown paper bags of pastries elsewhere.

My boyfriend sent a message before I woke up saying he would have to stay in the small town hosting the conference for a few days longer, as the department had set up a series of ‘unmissable’ tours of legacy digital manufacturing design centers as well as visits to the homes of a couple centenarian former employees of early 昭和 pre-conglomerate telegraph companies. I texted back that I understood. He hearted the message. I got it, really; I don't mind his obsessions, or fear that he is hiding something from me, or that I will be thrown out some day for being too boring or too cruel. We do not often discuss it but I think that he understands I am unkind, though that I am not like that because I want to impress upon him the sum total of his unkindnesses toward me, but because it is all I have to give him. It is worse than exhaustion, but less bad than malice. I enjoy when he is here in the way that I enjoy brief pounding rainstorms—how for some time I am prevented from going outside, from buying groceries, from going on a walk so long my feet cramp for days afterwards. I have no choice but to read, or cook, or bury myself in him.

I wanted to buy some beautiful fruit before walking home, but I didn’t. I passed the stand, open to the early afternoon light, milk crates stocked with berries and a few early apples from up north and mangoes and bananas from further south, each seemingly larger and more colorful than any fruit should be. When I've bought them the strawberries have been underdeveloped, stunted, teratogenic—are white and tough and fibrous on the inside—the same with some of the melons. It all seemed very image-focused, the stand, to the detriment of the actual qualities of the fruit. But they did look delicious.

The rainy season is almost gone now, and while some people here hate the mugginess of 梅雨, I’ve never found it so unbearable, even without air conditioning. I turn off my boyfriend’s window unit sometimes, even, and throw the windows open in the dark, letting the water well up into my skin so that I might feel like an amphibian feels. During these nights my heart races and I use wireless ear-buds to relay the audio of online videos I can’t see because I turn my laptop’s screen off and place it on the floor next to my bed. Heat increases the rate of all my bodily functions, which I have heard can lead to an early death. This is the reverse of suspended animation or cryogenic preservation. In some sense I am fruitlike. I imagine and or picture my death often and creatively, though not longingly, or with precision enough to alarm a therapist. I once tried to explain this to my ex therapist—told him that he doesn’t need to be alarmed—and I watched his eyebrows go circumflex and his legs rearrange themselves five, ten times over the course of the hour’s session. I worry sometimes that he believed his life was hopeless, and tried to compliment his abilities very often, from which I hope that I appeared, as was my intention completely, sincere and supportive.

Tomorrow is my birthday and I turn twenty-four years old.