You are a grown-up, so you fill your new bathtub with Legos and Coca Cola and go to your kitchen—which is also the bedroom and the living room and the hallway—and fetch the bowl of cookie dough. You sit in your stew of sugar and plastic and wolf down the dough in fistfuls. You let the Coke sizzle against your skin and the baking soda sizzle in your stomach. You are a pincushion inside out. You shove grapes into your nostrils and a plastic bag over your head and sit on the floor in allowed idiocy. You swallow your Big Girl pills with plain squash. You tear your teddy bear open with bitten nails and fish the heart out of its chest, embarrassed and relieved by its existence. You cement your fingers together with a hot glue gun and call in sick on your first day of work. I’m in a sticky situation, you say. You eat a jar of Nutella for lunch until it clogs your throat. You lick lampposts in the middle winter and leave a frosting of tongue-flesh and saliva on the steel. You swallow your gum. You spend the whole night taking Buzzfeed quizzes and find out that your love language is quality time, so you vow to love yourself sick. You draw stuttering smiley faces on your walls and tell them jokes without pronouncing your R’s. You throw rotten tomatoes at them and call it liberation. You crawl everywhere you go. You buy nineteen pounds of liquorice laces and weave them into a blanket and in the morning, you sit in the shower for two hours to get rid of the smell of ammonia. You let days loop around yourself, then weeks, until they merge into one and Mondays no longer exist. You use too much toothpaste and let it dribble from the corners of your mouth. You become nocturnal. You pretend to be an owl and fly around your shoebox-flat until your neighbours whine your feet back to the ground. You stack empty Mountain Dew bottles into a pillar that tickles the ceiling and knock it over, roaring like King Kong. 

But it’s no fun being alone, so you decide it’s time to find a family of other new adults. Now, you have a commune. You flood your floor with mattresses and rename yourselves so your parents can never find you. You keep the taps open even if you don’t use them. You replace serotonin with dopamine. You all get to play God for one day, and you argue about the order and push one of you down the stairs. She dies. You try to perform lobotomies on each other but can’t be bothered to look up instructions on Google, so you shove fishhooks into each other’s ears and scrape brain cells out like earthworms. One of you only walks backwards for the rest of her life, and another becomes allergic to all things yellow. You go to an amusement park and open your seatbelts, and at the height of your ride the seat rockets one of you into the sky. You never see her again. You make prank calls to China. Your bones brittle from lack of care and you mail their sandpaper-dry ashes to your parents. You consider sending your middle fingers, too, but realise they’re way more fun to hurl towards middle-aged drivers. You remove each other’s teeth and make friendship bracelets out of them. They’re dotted Dalmatian from holes and the thread dives through with ease. You fill your kitchen—which is also the playground and the cruise ship and the zoo—with water and goldfish. You paint the goldfish candyfloss-pink. You spend your days floating like deflated balloons and forget to feed the fish, so they nibble on you and grow huge like hippos. You digest yourselves into sacks of bio-waste and since no one wants to take the trash out you eventually stink of your autonomy. The neighbours notice. One of them, a mother of five, kicks herself in and shakes her head at the mess and calls CPS but since you are not children, they refuse to take you, and you rot away in your commune of grown-ups until the goldfish die and you no longer remember how to chew.

Veera Laitinen (they/she) is a student, a queer writer, and an avid reader from Finland. Their work has appeared in Vagabond City Lit, Literally Stories, Nowhere Girl Collective, and Pom Pom Lit.