Fuck Bradley Cooper

[title type="subtitle-h6"]Johanna Lepro-Green[/title][vc_row][vc_column width="11/12"][vc_column_text] My mom is dying, and I find comfort in the following activities: burrowing in someone’s armpit hair and taking a big sniff, reading Gossip Girl books puffy and wrinkled from the bath, and filling up online shopping carts with thousands of dollars’ worth of clothing I never buy.I cry everywhere. I cry in the bathroom stall of three different McDonalds. I cry on the city bus, a crowded lecture hall, a corner of the parking garage near my apartment, at my favorite Vietnamese restaurant, and with strangers in my bed. I spit out various foods and drinks. I have a hard time swallowing. I spend a lot of time on my hands and knees, like a sick cat, hacking up sips of beer and bits of chicken nuggets.My mom is dying, so I stop cleaning my room or wearing underwear. Whenever I take off my jeans at the end of the night, there are big white spots on the crotch and I don’t care. My room smells. It really stinks. I like taking people I meet in bars back to my apartment so that they have to take on the stink for a little while. In the morning they wake up surrounded by my trash and leave as fast as they can. I think about what they tell their friends. I like being the crazy girl with the disgusting room and the wet, sloppy tears and smelly pussy. I like when they fall asleep in my bed and get raisins or pennies stuck to their back.A few weeks ago, I went on a date with a girl whose dad had just died. We went back to her place and I woke up with gum in my hair.Before my mom got sick, I was very concerned with being thin. I’d compulsively check the line of my collarbone to make sure it was still there. I’d wrap my fingers around my wrist and pull on the skin beneath my chin. Now I feast. I eat family sized bags of potato chips, Oreo shakes, waxy wafer cookies in pink, yellow and brown, pizzas delivered at 2 a.m. I’m getting fat, even if I spit a lot of it out. When I take off my clothes, I am covered in angry red grooves. My breasts are getting heavy. I hold them when walking up stairs, even if there are other people around. My breasts are always sore. I like when a girl takes one of my breasts in her hand and sucks on my nipple like a baby, and I feel a sharp pain surge through them, like I’m about to get my period. I like when they call my breasts “tits.” It makes me feel like a weathered, but beautiful older woman, dreaming of getting her real estate license and her son off drugs.My mom is dying, so I take long naps. I sleep for eighteen, twenty, thirty hours at a time. When I sleep, I have crazy dreams. In my favorite dream, I’m strung from a hook by my back and being twirled around by every girl I’ve ever loved. In my least favorite dream, Bradley Cooper asks me to marry him and puts a yacht up my butt. I tell him, “I didn’t ask for you to put a yacht up my ass!” and he says, “You don’t have to ask, baby. I know what you want.”My mom takes selfies in the hospital. She sends me pictures of her smiling widely with a breathing tube up her nose. She looks like a punctured balloon, or E.T.’s sister. I visit her every couple of weeks for a few days at a time, sitting at her bedside, watching episodes of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman and coming up with excuse after excuse to leave the room. I love my mom so much. She’s so special. Her fingers smell like garlic. She listens to a lot of Joni Mitchell, and has made it a point to always kiss me goodnight because she’d wanted more affection as a kid. When she saw my fourth tattoo, the one on my wrist, she screamed at me. I had promised her I wouldn’t get another until I’d graduated college, but I did it anyway. She screamed and screamed for a solid ten minutes and then suddenly grew calm. “Let me see it.” I gave her my wrist and she took it in her hands. “You know,” she said sheepishly, “I actually love it.”Fuck cancer. That’s what I say to myself every five minutes. Fuck cancer. Fuck cancer. Fuck cancer. Fuck God, fuck capitalism, fuck cancer, fuck Bradley Cooper.I’m desperate to be seen. I “accidentally” bump into people on the street. I fake loud conservations on my phone. I burp loudly in class and don’t cover my mouth. I start to feel a certain kinship to the crazy woman in my neighborhood who walks down the street screaming in a giant, red hat. I feel really connected to her, like we’re kindred spirits, until one day I’m walking to work and she’s walking towards me and she reaches out and slaps me hard across the face. “Fuck off, bitch!” she tells me. I feel betrayed. I start driving to work.My mom and I used to fight a lot in the car. There was something about a Volvo that just got us revved up. No matter how well we’d been getting along that day, ten minutes in a car together and we’d be screaming about something crappy the other one did years before. There were a few times as a kid that my mom kicked me out the car and drove away, only to come back five minutes later, apologizing without looking at me. That’s one nice part about my mom dying. No cars. She can’t drive anymore, and even if she could, she’s always in the hospital. Instead, when I’m home, my dad drives me places. My dad doesn’t talk when he’s driving and doesn’t like when I talk either, although he’s fine with singing. He lets me pick the radio station. When I’m not in the car with him, he listens to NPR at a deafening volume. My sister and I always knew he was home from work when we’d hear “All Things Considered” blasting and then the slam of a car door.My sister doesn’t acknowledge that my mom is dying. She’s at a fancy graduate school studying freshwater fish and living with her boyfriend, who has a sad little ponytail and identifies vocally as a male feminist. When I try to talk to her about it, she changes the subject, or tells me that it’s too much for her to think about right now. My sister had to drop out of college when she was twenty because she had such a bad case of OCD. My mom took her to countless therapy appointments and took care of her for a year until she was okay again. She made her omelets in bed and bought her beautiful dresses from department stores and held her while she counted each beat of her heart. Now my sister rarely visits. My mom pretends this doesn’t upset her. I kind of want my mom to die before my sister comes home next to spite her, which sounds fucked up, but I’m just trying to be honest.I miss things. I miss what it felt like to be little. I miss rolling around in the grass and finding fuzzy caterpillars to crawl over my fingers. I miss three-way phone calls with girls whose names I’ve forgotten. I miss sitting on laps and being carried to bed. I miss softball teams and the silly secrets I kept. I’m hungry for other people’s stories. In bed, I ask girls to tell me about their childhood. “Tell me about your second grade teacher,” I beg. “Tell me about your first kiss.” [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]