Nine months of no packages, and then this one. rswfire had it in his hands somewhere away from home, working the seal open with a running commentary — it's just a little bit difficult — the way a person narrates a thing they already know is going to be worth the trouble. The box held two orders' worth of intention. He pulled the first item out and immediately registered the mismatch: the water bottle was bigger than he thought it would be. He turned it, sized it against the fact that he would be carrying it, and then found the redeeming detail. At least it says Jeep on it.
The bottle was infrastructure for a substitution already decided. He described the plan in the present tense of something about to begin — fire water, electrolytes, chili powder, potassium and magnesium — and named what it replaced without softening it. It's better than drinking Mountain Dew. The electrolytes themselves weren't in the box; they arrived tomorrow, which meant another trip back to this same location, the pickup point registering itself as a place he returns to rather than a place he is. He allowed that he might have to get used to the taste. He said he was very excited about it anyway.
But the bottle was not the reason for the package. rswfire moved to the earrings with the energy of someone getting to the actual point. He had wanted a very cute earring for his right ear specifically — hoops on the left, studs on the right, both sides hooped at the moment and one side about to be corrected. He worked the tiny hardware free of its packaging to hold it up to the camera. They looked like diamonds. They weren't; he named them for what they were. Very tiny things, he said, twice, the smallness clearly the feature. He couldn't try them yet — they needed disinfecting first, and that had to happen back at his own space. Then he saw the little diamond-looking things catch the light inside the packaging and the patience broke. Oh my God, we got to get back right now.
Music covered the drive. The next thing was close-range: hands, ears, mirror, small hardware, the stud in place and his own assessment arriving faster than his approval of it. It's bigger than I wanted. He stated the constraint immediately — he got the smallest one there was, it's the smallest size they had, less than a carat — establishing that the gap between the object and the specification wasn't a failure of selection but the edge of what existed.
Then, unprompted, he closed off a reading before anyone could offer it. And this isn't me just trying to like be more discreet gay or something. The correction came out ahead of the accusation. He put the actual criterion in its place, in his own words: he just really likes the small elegant ones. The standard was aesthetic, it was his, and he stated it plainly enough that no one else's frame could be laid over it.
He considered a second placement — thought maybe he'd put one here, noted he had worn a stud in that site before — and then declined his own suggestion. He wants those to be hoops. And the healing ones weren't ready; he named the discipline required and the consequence of skipping it. Really need to leave them alone or they're never going to. The restraint was specified as precisely as the jewelry was.
The last thing he did was revise himself in real time. Maybe it will grow on me, he had said at the start of the mirror sequence, hedged. Then: I think it might grow on me though. Then, at the end, no longer future tense at all — I think it already is. Yeah, it's growing on me. The stud had not changed size. rswfire recalibrated around it, and said so out loud while it was happening.