tiny tender

what if every decision you made was the right decision?

In a neon-lit room dampened by fabric softener and watercolor hues, a lover makes you forget you own a phone, a meal plan, or urgency to attend to. You haven’t been sure in a long time, about anything really, adrift and pushing through, but you wanted to be absolved anyway, of indecision or transience or the feeling of life slipping away, so you’ve locked in here for a few weeks like a sprinter practicing hand movements and disguise. What is it that we’re sprinting to? I’m here because I choose to be and not because I know why. Both in this room and on this planet, suppose that much is true.

The day I exiled impermanence as the stepping stone from sorrow to bliss was the day cruelty came to an end, and with its halt finally enough breathing space for spring to come. Uncertainty is scary, but it’s intuition’s viagra.

Attention span cut into slices, I’m being taught a simpler life. Offline and solemn. We’re making marginal progress here. Phone battery is at 5% taking its last breaths, and with it I can feel my relevance dying digit by digit, too. But here’s the thing about obsession: it’s gracious enough to wipe your memory drive clean. Everything you thought you cared about is no longer. Hair pulled back to the sound of waves crashing against the rocks, hunched over the cliff of not knowing the right thing from the wrong thing, it’s okay now. I tell you I’m nothing without my legacy, worried. You tell me that my legacy is a beating heart and a birthmark, not the emails or the medals I polish.

Proclivity for drama never dies, so I’d come prepared to lie about myself again, standoffish and impatient, to relieve you of the inevitable dirty secret; the secret is that you’ll grow bored with me unless I’m doing somersaults. I won’t tell you I spent last Friday with my thoughts. Thursday, and Saturday. Much like the greats, I do most things alone and splendid, but like the cowards, I don’t tell anyone I like it that way. Love will always be tricky for women who would rather a reservation for one than an hour in unwanted company — what the wallet loses in sharing, the head gains in peaceful indifference. Do you see where I’m coming from? Have you, too, been held hostage by à la carte? Transactional blabbering is the last resort of the worst resorts when solitude isn’t a threat. They try to convince us aloneness is a nightmare — I think they’ve just never sat across a picky eater with speculative theories and a stingy hand. But enough about those guys. You say I wouldn’t be so wise if I weren’t a loner. I nod.