Am I an awkward secret you are ashamed of?
Or is that another story 
Only true in my own head?

Does who I am make you uncomfortable?
Or is that just your reaction 
To the world?

What holds the space between you and I?
Just different lives, or is the familiarity
of our anxious brain chemicals just too much?

What if we spent the day together?
Got lip injections?

(like the woman sitting in front of me – 
Her phone text is size 16, at least – comic sans.
She loves someone very much. emoji)

Maybe that’s what
People who were once sisters,
Now siblings,
Should do. 

It’s a full moon tonight.
take care of that chaos
you’ve been putting off.

In the morning, it might
not be waiting for you.
In the morning, it
won’t feel the same.

That’s all chaos really is –
an attempt to feel
outside our own skin,
an imagining that
we have that control.

In the morning, you
can wake and call it
rebirth.

Anxiety meets
brain sickness meets
horoscope apps we can
all place the blame on.

In the morning,
you might finally
feel different.

When you are mentally ill
Time will push and pull, freeze
And stagnate in your memories.

Your memories –
They are different than others.
Pathways for some, they will
Always be ditches for you.
Deep grooves in your brain
you, everything you care about –
it all gets lost in the wash.

(There was a ditch on the side of the road where you grew up.
Near the school, the YMCA. A classmate rolled his truck into it once.
You drove by in a friend’s car and thought, “shit.”)

You fall into the past with so much ease,
Only realizing how stuck you are when
It’s too deep to climb out. 

You fall in,
submerged in the moment,
thrown back into each big regret,
each deep embarrassment
to hash and rehash and hash again.

Your heartache bowls you over every time
Like it’s the first time
All over again.

Pills are teaching you presence,
Present-tense for the first time 
In your life.

Sometimes, the silence,
The direct gaze of your mind 
Onto a standard scenario – 
objects, places, things,
A verb or two,
All related through the obvious
Vs. the relational contortions of your mind –
Sometimes, it’s beautiful.

Other times, it makes you feel 
So numb, so lonely.

Trapped in single moments in time
Without ten other thoughts, memories
Joining you, shielding you, 
Pecking at you. 

To be present is a gift
And it’s also the loss of your
Most constant companions.

But your friends are always waiting.

The day my cat died it
Rained and rained. 

I try not to be a believer 
In too much custom-made symbolism.
But this sudden, long downpour
Was the Universe acknowledging
My love and agony
For Donut.

But this morning, 
As my flattened pillows try 
To prop me up in bed while 
I write, the sun is a goddamn
Smokeshow.

The birds in the trees have their
Usual morning conversations.
The neighborhood dogs shuffle through
Their morning walks, achingly slow 
As they check each bush for pee-mail.

On the days the world and the humans in it
Make us collectively gasp, collectively fear,
There is no prophetic downpour. 

Nature moves along, keeping to its 
Structure and routine like the Virgo Moon
We all pretend it isn’t.

The weather can’t react to this much constant pain. 
And we can’t possibly attribute so much
Shit to symbolism through precipitation.
It’s too much – even for the Northwest. 

Nature moves on, sticks to structure because
It has to. 

It is our worn, flattened pillow,
Yellowed with years of drool and just
Trying its damnedest to prop us up.

This has always been a story between me and myself.

You are here and I am here –
That is good in many ways. But when a production
Thrives on tension. On melodrama. 
On closed doors and time alone to create and feel
Remotely sane – the confines of joint living, joint breath
Are a goddamn terror to us both,
If we’re honest. 

The trickery of co-leads is that half the time, they’re minor, 
ignored characters played by someone familiar enough
For the audience. For the movie jacket. 

I get swept into our coproduction and forget
That everything in my bloated, stubborn frame will 
Revolt the moment you stay in frame 
A beat too long.

But i ask you to stay, to come closer.

I am not someone you should trust to share this screen.
This space. This life with.
I will so earnestly declare my commitment to our time together.
I will always believe myself. I will believe myself so much
That you believe in me. 
It’s a trick played on you and me alike. 

But you are not my co-star. This is not a story of you and me.
This is a story of the endless constellations i contain
In this chonky skin suit. This is a story of me and every
Version of myself.
The more i can remember this, the better for us all.

Let us share our scripted time. Enjoy it for all and what it is.
But know that we are not the final destination.
Not enough to reroute plotlines for a better ending,
At least.

These constellations are burning.
They will either escape or implode
And you shouldn’t get too close
When the time comes.

This has always been a story between me and myself.

Move the furniture from corner to corner.

Make piles. Start each with a theme

and smother it in minutes as your ADHD brain clashes with any sense

of order, structure, or calm.

Move things back and forth.

Take the hinges off your closet doors.

Make a spacious dog bed in front of the row of perpetually forgotten paintings you hold onto,

just in case.

Puttering gives a sense of movement. of action.

Puttering is a word mostly used to describe the elderly, who until now held authority over days filled with household movement and nothing else.

Puttering is its own unit of time now.

Pile the stolen office and craft supplies from past jobs into various bins, crates – put them away.

Leave the box of papers you should probably shred but aren’t entirely sure are even important

pushed against the wall. You’re not a real adult anyway.

Puttering is its own unit of time now.

The Abbess Doña Rosalinda Alvarez Powerpants Della Cuervo, or Donut.

You were my best companion through some hard fucking times. Thank you for choosing me. You were a fierce 8-pound monster and all who met you cowered in your path. Just as you liked it.

Too many tears and feelings, so I’ll leave it at that.

This is a dirty window and a fluffy orange and white cat on a porch outside of said dirty window.

It’s my dirty window. I am surrounded by dirt. And cats.

This cat is a spectral cat. She is possessed by the soul of a victorian ghost, who probably did a tragic or manic thing in some variety pack ordeal of love lost, mental illness, and The Patriarchy.

(Same)

When I am alone and most calm, late at night, I hear her wail.

It starts small, meek, and most unsettling – the mourning of someone small,

accelerating into what sounds like a solo cat fight

(what does a cat fighting itself sound like? Oh YOU KNOW)

I look out the window, unnerved, but familiar

and there she is, big ol’ donut eyes looking straight at me,

alarmed at the attention.

She runs away when I got outside,

but I think she wants a witness to her centuries of suffering.

She is very fluffy.

I am ash. Ash is the earth. The earth is a goddess. Therefore, I am not dead.

-Roman funeral poem