The covid self-test kit got stuck in the Haines vending machine. I crouched down, the hems of my blue skirt brushing against autumn leaves on the ground, as if making eye contact with a plastic bag could somehow coax it out of its home.
Two pieces of mint stared back, their gaze steady, silently curious. They were about one centimeter in radius, with red and white stripes on their rims, like the pair of old-fashioned glasses my middle school English teacher used to wear. Out of place, out of space.
I’ve heard all sorts of theories about why the mints are there. The theory that seems to make the most sense is that the mints help you salivate before taking the covid test. “Except,” I remember countering, “no college student would sit down and eat candy before taking the test.” Someone else said the mints are there to hold the packet down. LA does occasionally get windy, but even so, why mints of all things?
I always throw the mints away. Maybe that’s why the packet refused to come to me, sensing the disdain in my eyes. Food coloring, excess sugar, and god forbid, peppermint.
It was the slightly curved stripes on the mints, though, that reminded me of that phrase, uttered in the underbelly of Haines, that will be part of me for the rest of my life. The red on the rim bled into the white inner circle; if you squint you could see a whirlpool.
She said, “I’m stuck in a circle of radius zero.”
When the machines in my head race to a screeching halt, when all that remains are the groans of unoiled cogs and rusted hinges, when I’m seen lying in the cracks of the deserted streets of my favorite town, too small, too weak, too tired, to do anything.
When every bit inside is set to zero. Invalid, invalid, invalid destinations; there’s no place to go. Invalid, invalid, invalid information, kicked out of everyone’s memory; there’s no place to stay. A circle of radius zero, a dot on the number line, a speck of ink that shouldn’t exist.
The two pieces of mints continued to stare back. With their big, round Doctor-Suess-style eyes, they seemed so innocent, as if I were the crazy one to have gone on a trip down memory lane nine months later, to that specific September afternoon, and relate them to exhausting episodes of spiraling. They’re just candies, after all, right?
I jammed my front arm into the vending machine, bones pushing painfully against metal, as my fingers hunted for the plastic bag. Nothing. Leaning even closer in, my ribs scraping against the lower row of the machine’s teeth, I tried again. Nothing.
I tore my arm free. The flap bounced back before swinging forward and slamming shut. The packet fell, gingerly, quietly, almost gracefully, to the bottom of the machine. It must have done a one-eighty on its final descent, for I could no longer see the mints, only a sheet of paper with test instructions printed out in a boring font. I lifted the kit out.
The mints ended up in the trash. Peppermint, old glasses, whirlpools, and all that.