I'll Just Pretend

It's typical, I fear. 

All day you are a ball of nerves, a countdown that's started too early, a tangle of trauma catching up to you in vulnerable moments. You see the ties you fought so hard to connect to yourself dissolve at the slightest tug, but the rules you make aren't fair, you're creating trick questions in your mind without reading them out loud. 

Your storage company writes to say they're raising your prices again. The sky feels full of signs, you spend so much of your time swatting them away.  

You take a few deep breaths. Let yourself think the unthinkable thoughts. Let yourself cry in the corner of your storage unit where the cameras don't reach. Spend a sunny evening looking for four-leaf clovers and coming up short. 

Still, sometimes the looking alone does the trick. Sometimes stepping outside the ticking clocks for just a moment is enough to set your sight straight again. 

Down by the Water

The bartender can't be more than 25. She wasn't even alive to see the 90s, you hear your internal monologue say, as she plays Imogen Heap and you realize it's like you playing 70s music in your youth and dipping into history. 

But you remember hearing this song on the alternative radio stations before you were barely a teen, feeling like you'd unlocked secrets of the world beyond, like you knew a darkness now that you couldn't have known if you were just a child. You remember a temporary home, at the end of a long corridor, and how sparse your existence that you never questioned. It occurs to you (again! again!) that everyone lives an entire life like this, with details piled upon details, years and decades of their own experiences. Does everyone think so much about the things they've seen?

It doesn't matter. 

You can only play the cards you were dealt.  

Distract

Some days, you arrive at the bar sheveled, a mess of thorns and distractions, some days you're a single focus laser from the moment you sit down. For a person who doesn't like a casino you sure will take the gamble every time. 

Today, you arrived with your head lost to someone else's shoulders, forgotten on the 6 train heading north, every thought is drifting without arriving anywhere, and you have so many places you need to be arriving now. There are so many stops on your route, so many deliveries to be made. You haven't the time to dawdle. 

It occurs to you that maybe not everyone lives their lives forever about to go somewhere else.  

They read your manuscript and tell you there's something there. You wish you knew how to revel in that thought, because it looks delicious from afar. In the end, though, all there is is returning to the page, carrying on. This isn't the life you choose if you want to finish. 

It's not the path if you ever want to think you are 
done.  

 

May

Wake with a muscle twisted out of formation, a reminder of mortality despite the nascent life of May outside your window. Try to make sense of the strange goings on of the last few days, scenes of disaster unfolding around you but what sense is there to make. You decide to focus on none of it, to let your mind wander instead, you are but a crumb in the universe and if the gods wanted something special for your life surely they would have let you know by now. 

This reminds you to check your mailbox. 

It's May now, all of life lies ahead of you. Maybe that is the special thing, you wouldn't be mad if it was. Maybe keeping you around is how the gods let you know. 

Improvements

You stop reading the news. If you can't change the state of things, you think, what use is there in knowing what they are? This brings you unexpected relief, which in turn makes you angry. 

On the page, a story you've twisted inside out begins to sound more like itself again. The same could be said for you, come to think of it. You know the solution when you're out of sorts is always to lace your running shoes or sharpen your pen and yet so often you fail to return to the witchcraft that never fails you. In the park, clovers swell into enormous verdure, but you have yet to stop and find a four-leaf. 

What could you possibly be doing with your time
that is more important than that?

A sense of mysterious joy is starting to spread through your appendages. Nothing ostentatious yet, nothing big enough to be reliable, but definitely there, definitely sparking. 

If you don't look directly at it, maybe it will come. If you feed it whatever crumbs of wonder you can find, maybe it will grow. Everything is almost, almost happening. 

All you have to do 
is hold on.  

Good Thing

How comforting Mondays in their clarity, in their reliable structure. Sunshine in the morning, to-do lists for breakfast, a respite from the droning of your mind. The questions seem smaller today, they don't cut as deep, only jab at your subconscious a little. 

You step into the bar, your Monday bartender on a long-awaited European vacation, an unfamiliar face behind the bar, friendly, but anonymous. She doesn't know you, doesn't know your order or your corner table. She plays Take Me Home, Country Roads and Red House Painters, and you welcome the novelty, like an unexpected burst of color in monotony, or like a spark of joy in the midst of safety. 

The only other patron leaves, it's just you and the bartender and Fine Young Cannibals, a comfortable silence. Doing things alone together.  On your fingers, you wear the wedding bands of three generations before you. Maybe it grounds you. The little glass cup that holds a tealight on your table turns out to be an old yogurt jar. 

This brings you no end of joy.  

That's more than enough
for now.  

In Perpetuity

The rain moves on but the weight lingers. You are as lost as ever, more questions by the minute, unraveling into the April chill. The radiators in your apartment bang on, the heat reviving long after it thought its season would be over. 

You say your apartment, but the truth is you have no home of your own.  

This is one of the questions that circle your drain and threaten to pull you down with it. 

But, you remind yourself, you have come out of ashes before. You have risen from the drag and built worlds around you that swirled itself into curlicues of joy. You have brought into existence experiences that did not exist before you conjured them. 

The last few eons have been a setback, 
I'll grant you that. 

But for all the times you've been lost in the woods, 
the woods have never killed you. 

There is still a chance that
there are curlicues left to be 
lived.