064: for the time being

Suddenly it’s overcast, but the air is soft and warm. I’ve opened the lefthand screen door. My room smells sweet and birthdayish, like it did when I was a kid––though that was a different room, in a different time––and while I feel less certain now who I am, in some ways I know I haven’t changed. I am still sensitive, stubborn, as malleable to the world as a handful of water in a chorus of waves. Still shy, afraid at night, longing always to be somewhere else and in some other time.

I stifle that feeling a lot. But with the slow, seeping spring, I feel it coming back. When the window is open, the sky soft grey, the air moving. When I am alone.

Note: This post is actually 127 words but it's fine because I don't care.

063: three strange old ladies in the café today

Lady who ordered mint green tea and was spotted rubbing the warm tea pot all over her face

Lady reading so intently that she did not hear or see me as I stood two inches away and said loudly, repeatedly, “Ma’am, I think I brought you the wrong tea. Ma’am? Ma’am???”

Lady who ordered three plates of food and ate steadily through them, with great care, picking apart her avocado toast like it was some craft, wearing spindly glasses, talking to no one, and when I started to take her empty plate away said “Oh no, you can leave that”

062: except nothing broke?!

I nearly broke an entire tray of water glasses and for the rest of the day I felt wragged. My nerves, frayed edges, watery and near to buckling. My wrists, the veins in them sogged with bleary gel. Everything was frayed on the edges, myself, the world, everything in it. The spaces between people, less defined, blurrier, far more dangerous.

The memory of it will stay in my mind as long as I must carry water glasses across a room. The fear, as stupid as it is, penetrative and crystalline. This particular anxiety cut into my bones, yet another specimen.