I am not dirty because I am lazy. I am dirty because I am present . The world is a wet, leaking, sweating, shedding organism, and I am not afraid to roll around in it. Your sterile bubble will pop eventually. Mine is already popped. I am already wet, already stained, already smelling faintly of yesterday’s fried onions and today’s hopelessness.

It’s the only way to live without going crazy.

My apartment smells like victory—if victory is stale beer soaked into carpet and the metallic tang of a radiator leaking rust. I don’t own a sponge. I own a crusted-over dish brush that I use for everything: scrubbing the bathtub ring, scraping the burnt eggs off the pan, and occasionally scratching my back. The line between clean and dirty died in this apartment six years ago, and I didn't go to the funeral.

My POV is a cracked lens. A greasy thumbprint smeared across the camera of the world. When I look at your white tablecloth, I don’t see elegance. I see the last hundred sweaty palms that touched it before the busboy wiped it down with a rag he hasn't washed in three shifts. When I shake your hand, I’m not feeling a greeting. I’m feeling the dead skin cells flaking off your knuckles, the microscopic mites nesting in your cuticles, the ghost of the bathroom door handle you didn’t wash after.