a normal day of a normal woman

typical inner monologue

Morning. Cold hands, dry mouth, big trouble. Retainer out. Hungover and hollow underneath the cotton. My willingness for anything is just fear in a trench coat. These past few years have aged me decades, but who cares – still a crybaby with boobs attached. Email correspondence with the higher power: Hi, can you hear me? How many missing letters does it take to grow resentful? Two minutes of vigorous teeth brushing as it vibrates through my brain like I’ve been promoted to senior manager of intrusive thinking. Wants to see me winning or wants me because I’m winning? Oh, shut up now. Placing a sticky note over the mirror, right there, so I don’t have to see my face amidst the paranoia. Love me, love me not, just don’t oscillate in between and don’t confuse me. A thousand things could want me and I would find the one that doesn’t and shred my knees circling around it like a dog. I could have anything in the world and it still wouldn’t be enough. I guess that’s required for winning, or survival. I need to miss nobody and I need them all to miss me.

Head by Anna Weyant (2020)

More layers on, trying to feel like a pain suisse out of the oven. Uncomfortable silence, only it’s something I’m no longer trying to fill with remarks and questions. Scan the badge, keep your integrity, continue on. Hello, hi. I’m gracefully Foucauldian, following hierarchies. Nauseous niceties with the so-called friends, just feeling very cruel and gullible, that’s all. Disfigured, unimpressed, dishonest. Horrid fluorescent lighting, high school all over again until the day your joints stop bending. Rolling my vowels out with excitement as if I tossed each one in flour. You said you see yourself in me like it’s a compliment, but I don’t want to be like you and aren’t flattered in the slightest, what does that say about us? You’ll find out soon enough I’m married to greatness but chronically cheating on her with my demons, seeing them out the window right before she gets home. Hurry up! She will find out. She’ll never let me write well or win a medal again. Whatever happens on the fire escape stays there till morning. I don’t want to face any of this, just like when you get too lazy to clean you’ll shut the curtains so the dust is less obtrusive on the eye. Afraid of nothing, except for being seen, mistaken, or forgotten, which is admitting I’m afraid of everything.

Truth be told, I’m only doing my best when I’m being the worst to everybody. Ashamed to ask for help despite knowing how good it feels to be needed. I just can’t do that to another, what am I, a beggar? Jealous and growing unworthy, cried about some woman I’ll never meet. Not safe in this body, in this mind, in our house. Acupuncture and bloodletting, whatever helps this time. God, I miss half-hearted truths and soulless lovers. Being with some of them felt like taking a dollar at a time out of your savings for a purse: I knew damn well I was chipping away at my own future for shiny leather and a few nights out on the town. But live laugh love forgive I did. And what he did was kind of fucked up, by the way, if only he knew how tiring it gets to look for clues and final warnings in honest faces. At least there wasn’t much love to lose in that debauchery. It’s taking long enough to screw this distrust out of me.

A permastate of low grade wellness fever. How many calories is swallowing my pride for lunch? It doesn’t hurt to look around the grocery store trying to pick out neat hands and a great glance in the crowd, losing my domesticated mind over this primal danger, whether it’s something to mend or if I instigate it. Maybe the danger is me, the moth to every flame that likes to burn sideways. How could my love be reliable and my faith steady when I don’t know what I am? A shapeless pretender in chronological outfits. Writing a book or doing fuck all. I know ambition but I’m yet to find an honest place to devote my labor. I remember reading somewhere on the internet unwed women were more successful… Others say we’re superhuman and can do it all. Whatever either of those means. Too bad I was born with a soft needy heart and tiny persistent hunger, no protein will suffice. Don’t think in categories, think in doubts. Faulty all around. The word ‘success’ implies something stupid and vulgar like a slaughterhouse or moldy lemon peel. I really don’t want it, but I feel like I should, so I do. My tombstone will one day say, “And what the hell was this girl’s problem, anyway?”

Get thrown into the vortex of a late evening and you can hear my skull crack. The baby with the bathwater, the prophecy comes true. It splits me open, the asphalt, blood spills out, you’ll see the whole damn alphabet glistening in pools of red – those are the words I held back. Assemble them like magnets on a fridge. You can’t – it makes no sense on purpose. Haha. Cause I’m greedy. Cause I don’t want to be deciphered or maybe even understood. Cause I’m not yours until I say so, and once I am it doesn’t mean much because I’d learned to give it up for ego profit. What’s worse, longevity or leaving? Gravity pulls me back to my mistakes, and will soon do irreversible damage to my organs. And when I finally break under pressure, will I be worth a promise still? Don’t answer, I don’t really wanna know. Retainer in. Lights out. I promise to be grateful, always solemn, and to scratch your back. What a gift, this life. We’ll try again tomorrow.