“…A few months ago, my new dentist recommended that I use a night guard because my teeth were “showing early signs of wear.” (My grind-set follows me into the aged hours of the night). I usually never trust recommendations from for-profit healthcare weasels!! Until, of course, he showed me pictures of teeth subjected to decades of raw, unguarded grinding and oh my god. For a gentle out-of-pocket $500, a guarantee that my American Girl teeth will remain robust, saved from their future as teeny, little nubs bedded into recessed gums. I wear my night guard every night.

I’m on a preventative healthcare kick. Wearing my night guard, applying sunscreen, drinking Metamucil in the morning, oh yes! I am going to live forever!! The origin of my new undertaking was sudden and violent: the TikTok aging filter. To see a dogged and wrinkled crone piercing through my naïveté…a temporal collapse, a Back to the Future without time travel, an algorithmic TARDIS (Whovian hive rise up). “Spare me from this fate,” I prayed as I bought yet another moisturizer — spending money, surely suspending time.

It is easy to track time through consumption. Today was day 17 of my current birth control cycle. Yesterday, I finished a shampoo bottle. When I opened my fridge today, I was distraught to find nothing left to eat. Where we once tracked time in the sun's position and the angles of shadows on the ground, I follow it by running out of stuff, my shadow on the ground going mostly unnoticed. My only natural ruler for time: little house plants and the slow unfurling of their leaves.

In one of the poems of Ocean Vuong’s collection, Time is a Mother (which I am horribly late to reading), he writes out the Amazon orders of his mother, a nail salon tech, during the months following her cancer diagnosis. Sizes once medium now ordered in extra small. Consistent bulk orders of Advil. A body shrinking, an online record growing. Understanding someone’s life via their possessions is easy in a life marked with transactions. I can better assess if we would get along if you tell me what you own than if you tell me what you believe…”