Perception Magazine Spring 2020

Gecko Love Regina Trejo I look through my rounded glasses to look through yellow-tinted glass to look at the life of my lazy gecko. It just sits in the heat lamp all day. I wish I could say that my life is like that, but I sit under a white light staring through my rounded glasses in order to look at a computer screen that’s lit up in blue tones. They say I should get those glasses that protect your eyes from screens, but I don’t know who they are or where I can get those in a round frame. I make sidebar ads; the kind with the old dancing men that say, “I just got my yearly prostate exam” to urge other old men to get theirs done. Or the kind with a grainy picture of a piece fruit that I market as “the superfruit doctors won’t tell you about” and have fake testimonials from Karen C. of Denver, CO and Michelle P. of Sacramento, CA that say they lost over fifty pounds and lowered their blood pressure once they ate said superfruit. I don’t like it, but it is a good use of my degree in communications, I guess.

Last week, one of my ads got 75,000 clicks in one day—2% of those clickers stayed on the pop-up page for over five minutes. I got a fifty-dollar bonus and thought about buying round sunglasses. Instead, I put it toward some stuff for me and my gecko. I bought him a new rock and a small baggie of crickets from the man who lives in the basement apartment. I got, for myself, the M&Ms with the pretzels inside and some frozen eggrolls. I’ve eaten all of the eggrolls and I’m resorting to eating just candy and ramen tonight. I don’t even dare to think about the crickets as food because I know that I’ll eat them. If my gecko can, I can. While I eat ramen, my mom calls. She asks how many quarters my laundry machine takes. Six to wash. Six to dry. Sometimes I need an extra to push the farthest right quarter into the dryer. It’s quite sticky. She’s on her way already since she only lives two buildings down. I can hear her clogs tapping down the sidewalk. I always open the door before she can assault it, which gets her mad. But I think it’s because she’d rather attack an inanimate object than her husband or her second husband.

She goes into my kitchen and asks for some vodka, but I remind her that I haven’t been able to find the rounded bottle I like to get at the Polish market.

She calls me a lazy freak. I kinda like it because if I can be anything like my gecko, I can be living my dream. Funny how that works: some people aspire to be like Madonna or like Warren Buffet, but I aspire to be like my bug-lovin’ lizard. I think about his loose scales and my mom lets out a whooping sound, Spring 2020 | 15