gaslighting someone into taking the rice cooker in the divorce she tells me to take the rice cooker. piles of things to be split in the divorce the decay of four years of collectivism and she wants me to take the damn pot, but she won’t let me keep the cat, or give me back the bauhaus t-shirt that i know she still has, probably crumpled in the back of a drawer. she says she couldn’t ever possibly be hungry enough to use it again (the rice cooker, that is) that the sadness is too much and she will waste away like i probably want her to— after all, i’ve left her this way. so here—take this jointly purchased piece of machinery as an act of good faith that you ruined me. that was in march, and i still don’t have a bathroom rug or one of those plastic sheets that go inside the shower: things that she took with her when she left but there is a rice cooker sitting on the kitchen counter gathering dust and staring vacantly as i microwave a single cup of minute rice.
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