I bought a new floor lamp that's exactly like my current floor lamp just to feel something. Felt like shit. Which is something. Both lamps work fine. Torch-style, pointing upward, spotlighting the ceiling as if there's something to see up there. The light is very bright and pleasant but the bar is unpolished. Just kidding. There's no bar. It's a two-bedroom dump on the fourth floor of a hundred-year-old house in a city you've never heard of. Will never hear of. Because I won't tell you. Because it doesn't matter. We're talking lamps here. Light and feelings. My roommate said I needed accent lighting. Some fat fixture to fill the room with its warm glow. I went to the Swedish place, you know the one, with the tiny meatballs and the forests in eastern Europe that are swallowed up by its thirst for cheap particle board to furnish dorms with bookcases. I bought a tall papery thing, cheap but almost voluptuous. An old man is a nasty thing, fine, but I'm not old. I have a smart phone with an array of apps and traded in my skinny jeans for a pair of baggy, flowy pants. I have two tattoos with plans for a third, more. I talk trauma with the best of them. My hair is thinning but you can only tell if you look closely or are standing above me. I'm sensible. I unpack the lamp and of course, my luck, my clumsiness, my life, the paper tears. I plug it in. Light lets itself be. Warm and fat. For once, my idiot roommate was right. But the light pours out of the tear with a harshness I can't accept. I try to paper over it. Masking tape, construction paper. Try to fix my light, my life, the voluptuous, fragile paper. I stick my tongue in the tear to plug the hole thinking it might be warm inside the heart of that light but it's cool, cold even, and tastes like nothing.


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