Flower

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I like eating cold, clammy wraps from big pharmacies that are open late and sell just a few foods like protein bars and powders. I like wraps near the skin creams, neoprenes and scrunchies. I also like the wraps they sell in cheap supermarkets and franchise corner shops and mid-tier garages. The cheap supermarket near me sells just a few lunch things they don’t have an obvious lunch bit. The few wraps they do sell are really close to the tills, seemingly on the wrong side of the tills you have to know they’re there otherwise when you do see them it’s probably on the way out, too late to think to buy one. I like wraps fabricated on industrial estates a long way from here that come in nondescript cardboard and plastic sleeves. I won’t register what’s inside the wraps I like it doesn’t matter at all. The best wraps all taste the same: sweet creamed hospice. The wraps I like are best and look like these spent prophylactic alien larvae props. I push them through my mouth. The best wraps are always presented in half with the two halves side-by-side in the sleeve. The cut ends of it are cut on the bias and are on prominent display behind the plastic window at the top of the package. The visible cross-section is not at all instructive. The damp folded ends are hidden in the cardboard bottom like its genitals. This differs from the wraps I tend not to like which are detailed. They have purples and dark greens in. They are performatively healthy and aspirational. These wraps tend to be presented halved with the halves end-to-end rather than side-by-side in the packaging and their ingredients are conspicuously discrete. The cut ends of the wrap are straight and are hidden behind a cardboard centre bit where the label is. Instead, I like the pharmacy ones where it’s satisfying and you can see the striation. There’s usually a bit of wet stuff on the inside of the see-through plastic where the wrap’s touched the plastic in transit. I think buying a wrap in a pharmacy is incredible. I once bought a huge wrap in a Walgreens in Manhattan. It came with a sachet of extra mayonnaise tucked into the packaging even though it was already heavy with mayonnaise. I bought it and a thin can of Coke Zero and ate and drank while walking, like an actor. It’s usually a kind of chicken prep inside the wraps I like but it’s so unrecognizable to the mouth and the eye as to be moot, the name, the food question, and likewise the preparation who knows. A wrap is chopped foods folded up in a bib of par-cooked very flatbread. Once folded up it looks like a handmade food tube with hospital corners at the ends to stop the food tumbling out when it’s lifted vertical to eat. I eat it, or someone else eats it, and thinks of drastic things coolly. The best wraps are cavefish and peter forever outside time. That goes for a lot of what’s happening when I’m inside of a big pharmacy. I feel outside of time and outside of my life. I go in to a big pharmacy when it’s dark outside. I buy a wrap and a fizzy drink with my earbuds in listening to my music. My music lends the whole thing a cinematic thing. I’m the crushed protagonist buying a corpse-like wrap and a thin can of Coke Zero on another planet the same as this one. I’ll take my earbuds out to pay unless there’s a self-checkout. A self-checkout’s good for buying food at the pharmacy. The fantasy ennobles whatever and lifts what from the outside looks miserable but is not. When I have food in that’s bad for me I’ll bolt some of it then bin the rest and pour bleach over it in the bin so I can’t fish it out later and eat it, then. I’ll smoke the first cigarette from a new pack then go to the sink and hold the rest of the pack under the cold tap on full or I’ll have a first few pulls on a cigarette and pluck it from my mouth and flick it some irretrievable place. The expression on my face won’t change; when there’s no one around I needn’t be convincing. This is very realistic; my feelings happen internally. I’ll have half a glass from a bottle of wine then upend the rest of the bottle into the sink. I like making whatever bad thing irredeemable because I don’t trust future me to be consistent with current me. I know I’m inconsistent and this can be frightening. Self-love is an unobservable phenomenon that cavils forever. I should be punished but not killed outright. I bought a big bag of Doritos in Blackheath in the morning and started eating them in rough stacks outside the shop. I then sharpish turned and emptied the rest into a bin there and used the empty Dorito bag as a shiny mitt to force the Doritos deep into the bin, then. Everything else in the bin groaned and shifted downward. When I’m alone I’ll buy processed foods and unrefrigerated pre-mixed alcoholic drinks. Once, my mouth was full of Dorito pulp and room-temperature vodka maracujá drink outside a späti in Berlin in the summer, great. Cool Original Doritos have a remarkable savoury flavour I can’t place. The bag has a lot of blue and black on it, as well as dramatic photos of the Doritos. Blue and black are inedible executive colours. They mark the contents as exclusive and ambitious. I think it’s Cool Ranch flavour in the US, a thick dressing. I like processing Doritos with my mouth. Saliva piddles moisten while molars pound to a paste. I compress the paste between my tongue and the roof of my mouth to make now Dorito-flavoured and coloured spit leach from it and get into me via ducts. The paste remainder forms a curved cast and this is a remarkable temporary food object. I cut the soft cast object into neat nothings with my teeth then and swallow it easily. I’m just getting rid of shapes down a chute. The thing we all go to Doritos for is the intense flavour and astonishing colour. Dorito flavour is staggering.

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