i purchased an electric toothbrush recently.
what was once a haphazard attempt at removing the day’s filth has now become a structured and intentional routine.
the toothbrush counts the seconds and signals to me when to move to the next quadrant.
each tooth gets full attention, all gums are cleared of the plaque.
“no tooth left behind,”
the brush drones on.

the buzzing stops. i spit. i rinse.
and the day goes on,
and i disappear.  

where is the signal to shift my focus from the head to my heart?

i seldom write these days.
how can i write when it feels like the weight of my body sits atop ((crushes)) my soul?
words come from the hands, from the brain, from the heart,
but muscles don’t work when they can’t move.

in my dreams ((nightmares)), my legs are too heavy to escape,
my muscles too weak to summit the hill.
i wonder when i’ll take flight.

i am surrounded by a dense fog on most days,
sometimes it wanes, and i can see,
but mostly i’m ensnared.

but soon, baby girl, it’ll lift
and you’ll be free.

she held hands with a bouquet of sunflowers on the ride home today.

maybe she isn’t so lonely after all.

it’s raining outside today, and i binged “like a bird,” by fahira róisín. melancholia is the only word to use here. i eat that **** up. do i tend towards sadness as a means to escape my own? or to find solace in shared identity?

i’m hungry, but i don’t want to cook.
i’m tired, but i find it hard to sleep.
i’m lonely, but i don’t know how to be anything else.

im thinking about the future, a new concept for me. ever since i were young, i’ve had trouble imagining the future. not because i didn’t think i’d be alive, per se. i simply didn’t know how to see something that hadn’t yet happened. or maybe i didn’t want to see for myself everything i saw around me.

it’s hard to imagine a future completely different than the world that you’ve grown accustomed to.

is life just a cycle of looking down at your feet and realizing that you really need to clip your toenails, but deciding that you’ll do it later because you can’t be bothered in that moment, and then 6 days pass, and you still haven’t clipped your toenails. and then after 2 weeks, you finally pick up the nail clipper and do what you said you would 14 days ago. a moment of relief. and then you go upstairs and look at your laundry pile and decide you’ll tackle that later.