You fold yourself into the breakfast nook and wait for heat to rise from the vent at your feet while writing about the Internet. On the Internet. You slip the small heating pad your mother gave you after her surgery between the sheets and are sure it’s giving you cancer. Your fear of microwaves and electricity was ingrained at a young age.
You think of how cocky people who do not fear these things are. How adamant. You think of MS. Fibromyalgia. The woman on the BBC who fashioned her own protective clothing in order to escape WiFi.
You think of Richard Brautigan. Rural electrification. The New Deal.
Five years ago you stopped sleeping for a few months. Doubled over with impending adulthood, you would call your ex-boyfriend and have him explain how fluorescent lighting works.
Whispering gently from 2,000 miles away.
Tungsten-based filament. Mercury vapor. Luminous efficacy.
This is not a metaphor for anything.
You stared into the auburn glow of Sarah Bahlman’s microwave oven in 1989 wishing your parents would allow such a thing. Something so American. Even though you are American, just a different kind. You pictured microwaves as objects of idealized heterosexuality without actually grasping at what that meant, obviously, as you were five years old.
Other items on that list at the time:
• Kraft cheese singles
• Hot dogs
• Diet Coke
• Dirty Dancing
• The Disney Channel
• Pierced ears
• Footloose
You wanted to be a teenager in a small midwestern town and eat Kraft cheese and dance with boys. You wanted to carry a watermelon and wear Keds and dance on a log and kiss boys.
Mostly, you wanted to kiss boys.
