Compressed Consumption

In this season of life, I love you.

I read somewhere or heard in a documentary that fast fashion has hundreds of seasons per year. There are corresponding spaces with landfills that store the excess remains of inventory.

I store the capitalist change of seasons in my own consumption.

While you discard me at the end of winter, I keep you on like a warm winter coat.

As you unbutton the truth to see for yourself what exists at your seams, I’ll tailor your suits as you grow older, and as you shrink down, flatten out into an old handkerchief with floral embroidery breathing through the little windows for air to travel through. It stops at the plastic of your body, in the seasons buried under, beneath the landfills.

No, I cannot possibly love something so artificial and robotic. An image of what everyone buys with their complacent consciousness. Where are all the brainless buttons that I have buttoned and unbuttoned since the time I was born, especially the ones my grandmother stitched onto the itchy sweaters she would knit me?

I am ashamed of my guilt and selfishness that arise from preferences based on advertisements based on zeros and ones. I wish I was a fucking size zero. A size one would be fine too.

I wanna be able to eat spaghetti bolognese and not feel bad about it for days and days and days. In the magazines, they talk about weight loss. If I buy those jeans, I can look like Kate Moss. I know it’s not the life that I chose. But I guess that’s just the way that things go. Oh, yes, I’m fine. Everything’s just wonderful. I’m having the time of my life. ¹

Your train stop is at zeros and ones, sneezing into corporate receipts stored in your winter pockets. I cough the thick of winter through a foggy, polluted, and spray-painted graffiti of the closing doors of an A train, standing clear. Its sentiment is folded and pressed into the handkerchiefs of cotton and corn.

And in that long season, you are famine and illness. And it’s time, time, time. ²

Time capsule of sterile pockets of gluttony and greed.

We are breathing the same air of different seasons.

I love you beneath the driest summer, buried under deserted cities without fertile soil in which crops grow.

¹ Lily Allen, “Everything’s Just Wonderful.” Alright, Still. Regal Recordings, 2006.

² Tom Waits, “Time.” Rain Dogs. Island Records, 1985.