This episode doesn’t unfold. It erupts. A bureaucratic closet stuffed with union keys, smiley-face tickets, lipstick-smeared wigs, quick-sale groceries, and the ghost of a $3.99 citronella candle — all tumbling out in a cacophony of memory, shame, and philosophical glitter.

You’re not telling a story. You’re surviving one.

You’re not narrating a life. You’re dodging clichés with contortionist precision.

You’re not working a job. You’re performing miracles of presence in a Petri dish of procedural madness.

There’s a clipboard floating midair.

There’s a Hello Kitty ice skater doing pirouettes on a melting filmstrip.

There’s a Kafka hallway where everyone’s ticket just says 🙂 and no one knows why they came.

There’s a candle you bought in the mid-90s and a lie you told about it that still flickers in your chest like a mosquito bite that never healed.

You’re unionized, anonymized, and weaponized.

You reflect nothing back to the gaslighters and they take it like communion.

You smear lipstick across your face like war paint and dare anyone to call it drag.

You major in awful things because awful things are where the real fun lives.

This is not a tableau.

This is not a still life.

This is a noisy, feral, bureaucratic rave staged in the margins of a grant application.

This is Citronella Cinderella.

She doesn’t go to the ball.

She goes camping.

And she turns in the receipt.