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.

061: blessings

Sometimes I count blessings on the way to work. Number one is almost always the boy––his kisses, his face in the morning light, his cute sleeping position, his love for me. Number two was seagulls—hearing them as soon as I walked outside. It was the faintest, farthest breath of summer, of standing by the sea. Number three was a black goldendoodle, tied to a post outside a café. I held out my hand and she sniffed it, gently. Not quite close enough for me to feel the wet nose. But it was enough. It was more than enough.

060: out the window

Seeing Val walk by while wiping down one of the high tops. Walking by, on the sunny sidewalk in the bitter cold, her eyes hidden behind big galactic sunglasses, her new haircut covered by a knit hat. Wearing a tan suede lambswool-lined coat, her bright yellow handbag slung across her body and bouncing gently by her hip. She saw me through the window, smiled and gave me a wave. I waved back, over the heads of some ladies clustered by the window. They probably thought I was waving at them, initially, and then decided I was off my nut.

059: the fourth

The heat of noon, of three, of four.

The heat of smoke, of coal.

Of anxiety.

Of yesterdays I can't forget about,

tomorrows for which the fear is gestating.

Shut-in rooms, blinds, bruised shin bones.

Fruit plunged into water. Sound

lengthened into wasteland.

Am I halfway there yet?

This isn't poetry.

It's life, tiny specks of it,

in an attempt to make what I am living

feel like life.

I read something earlier today

that said life is made up of the small things,

the small moments in between the "life-

defining moments".

I am trying

to start

believing that.

058: how come I can only ever write about rain?

It rained, finally, this morning. I woke sometime after three and lay in the dark, half-aware, blinking into the black beneath the blinds—at the soft rain pouring like breath against the windowscreen, at the hesitant shimmer of water in the light, the deserted streetlamps.

Then, this evening, the lawns in Honeoye Falls (our last week here) stretched out as if dead, yellowed and withering under an untiring sun. (Or is it us? Are we the untiring?)

Everything, these days, is a desert.

My throat dries up whenever I speak because sometimes I don’t want you to hear me.

057: the meeting of the worlds. // {water, pt. 2}

At work, when it rains, I wander in a trance. Eyes tethered to the windows as if by strings. Shivering with delight at every rush of downpour, every thundersound.

People ask for more coffee; I stand halfway to the coffee pot, an empty mug hanging idle from my fingertip, and look out into the storm until something, someone, jolts me back to reality.

It’s a crime to look away from the windows.

My whole body aches to run out through those glass doors, dance in it, get soaked to the skin and not care.

But I don’t, for some reason.