In a modern-day miracle, one of my friends fell out of a tree and missed the ground, swooping up into the sky like a kite cut free of its strings. One of my friends tweeted oh my god oomf fell out of a tree but before she hit send, she got distracted by a TikTok about growing lettuce in empty soda bottles. It was from one of her favorite PlantTok influencers, a farmer in Shenzhen who posted according to Chinese timezones, so she kept late hours to catch his videos. One of my friends drank so much Coca-Cola after a meal scavenged entirely from 7/11 that he threw up, his vomit confettied with little pools of brown soda. Then he rinsed out his mouth with more Coca-Cola. One of my friends picked me up from JFK at 3 AM and we spent an hour learning that New York does in fact sleep and Wendy’s is not a 24/7 establishment. He drove me to Port Authority at dawn, where a cop asked for my ID because he was convinced I was a teenage runaway. To be fair to him, I’d think that too. One of my friends claimed she got COVID from working at McDonald’s no less than three times: the original COVID, then the delta variant, then omicron, although I’m pretty sure she got fired from that job after the first time. I brought her packs of buldak ramen when she had delta because the oily hot sauce was all she could taste. She was lonely in quarantine, so I cooked a plate for each of us and fought back tears as the spice lit sparks off my tongue. She insisted the snot streaming from her sinuses was the sickness, not the spice. One of my friends hosted a Lilo & Stitch showing in her living room and served eight different flavors of instant ramen from HMart. She cried at the scene where Stitch is about to board the spaceship with the councilwoman even though it was her third rewatch. I found one of her hairs, long and brown, tangled in the heap of ramen on my plastic plate. One of my friends shaved her hair off after she bleached it too many times and said fuck it, I’m gonna lose it all anyway. Her head was round and shiny as an egg in the afternoon sun. Once a pigeon shit on it—like literally, I’m not kidding, we were walking down Fifth Avenue and white shit came falling out of the sky like one of God’s angels was hosing off the sidewalks of Heaven—and she said at least she wouldn’t have to wash it out of her hair. One of my friends, when he heard about this, wouldn’t stop calling her Birdshit Baldy for weeks. One of my friends got so angry at him for teasing Baldy that she shoved him out of a tree and then when she saw what gravity had done to him, she said, Oh my God, I’m so sorry, please get back up. You’re fine. You’re fine, right? I’m sorry. Please get up. Please don’t tell anybody what I did.

Caroline Mao is an occasional writer and frequent designer. A computer science graduate from Barnard College, they live in New York City with their houseplants and tweet @northcarolines.