treatswords

It’s not what they say it is.

I don’t feel trapped in a gray sludge, I don’t feel like sleeping. I don’t not care, in fact I care too much.

I feel almost crippled. I think as I drive.

The response I am waiting for doesn’t come.

I turn my phone on silent and I sleep.

My dreams are scenarios played out. Humans in bright colored clothes, saying things I wish they had said or things I’m desperate for them not to say. Dark hair, long legs. He is standing there. It is you, but it doesn’t look like you. I feel an overwhelming sense of rejection.

It must be you.

I open my eyes. The sun warms my cats back, turning her black hair a shade of light brown.

I don’t want to pull the sheets over my head and plunge into a deep rest of cool bamboo sheets that smell of Tide. I want to get up. I do.

Work is work. That part of my life is gray. It is the smell of car seats when they have sat in the sun too long. A mechanical, used fabric smell.  If gray had a scent, work would be it.

The blocks of gray are broken up with colors of yellow. My creative time is yellow. For a brief moment, I can let my pen hit paper. It is the time my mind can play in dandelions and pretend they aren’t weeds.

I enjoy writing about the weeds in life. They need to be pulled from the soil, but no one wants to take the time to do it.

Chaos. Something we create ourselves.

It is not the anxiety of having to do something, it is the anxiety that I will do that something incorrectly.

That plays on repeat as I sip my fourth cup of coffee, grounds floating at the bottom, typing at my computer.

I drive home. I listen to old songs that catch old feelings. They hang, netted in my stomach. Squirming to be let free, gills gasping for air. I want to let them loose, I follow my friends advice.

Meditate.

I meditate. Candle lit in the early morning. My neighbors are not awake, no one is awake. I breath.

Run.

I run. My feet hit the ground hard, my breath shifts, my socks are wet. I feel release, I feel free. But the running eventually ends.

Pray.

I pray. I don’t know who I pray to, but I do. I speak my truth into the air, hoping the universe cups it in it’s hands, like a minnow in shallow water.

Their advice is my aloe. It soothes my burn until I step into the sun again.

I want to leave. I can hear the plane above, dipping in and out of clouds. I want to be on it. I don’t care where it is heading, as long as it lands.

I wonder what it would feel like to fake my own death. Allow the world to mourn me, while I suffocate in a rented house I can never leave.

I want to stay home. I want to wake up when I feel like it. I want to enjoy my coffee for as long as I need too. I want to sit on my deck until I feel warm enough to come inside.

I want to drink the entire bottle of wine. I want to feel the emptiness in my hands, the bottle wrapped in a drawing of a woman in a red dress, her blue hair pressed under my palm.

I want to and I don’t want to.

I crave and then I am full.

I envy the woman who can be cold. The one who doesn’t dwell over a response, the one who doesn’t analyze every last word. The one who does what she feels like doing because it makes her happy.

I am warm, too warm. I am the melted chocolate on the couch, the dripping vanilla cone, the soda that was left outside for too long, still fizzing, unbearable to drink.

I am kind and that is important. That is what matters.

At least that’s what they say.