I want to believe. Since the congressional hearing about life on other planets I haven’t stopped thinking about aliens. On set I kept trying to talk about men in suits proclaiming UFOs have crashed on earth and non-human biologics have been recovered and are presumably being experimented on (??) but no one cared. Everyone was too focused on getting creases out of a blue canvas backdrop. The only person who was willing to indulge in my space-universe-what-the-fuck-else-is-out-there-existentialism was the barista hired on the last day of the shoot to make everyone espressos but we could only talk in two-minute increments. Read an article about how the ocean is so warm it’s killing fish and causing extreme weather events and that thing where air presses into my skull happened again. Also thought they said in the congressional hearing thing that aliens had murdered people so I got into one of my nothing-matters-everything-I-know-will-be-taken-from-me-what’s-even-the-point moods. Hope the E.T.s spare indie girls with mental health issues and dwindling bank accounts. I’ll show them the alien head tattoo I got on my ankle when I was 24 with a group of girls from college I’m no longer friends with and maybe they’ll feel like I’m one of them. My dad called me after the shoot wrapped and asked how I was doing. Told him that I wasn’t sure what to care about anymore now that we’re watching the planet become uninhabitable and aliens are real. He said, “That’s a very philosophical question, Mary” and I wasn’t sure if he meant it in a positive or negative way.
© 2024 Mary Neely
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