my table, the air purifier humming as I bite my thumb’s nail and wonder what I even have to say. There, a dusty hairball against the floorboard I pretend not to notice. I try to ignore the pressure I put on myself too. I try to convince myself that I’m so easy going, that I don’t even care how much I don’t care. The weight and tightness in my chest, fear in the cartilage and fascia, my breath a faint whistle like the one blown by Rose at the end of the movie. There is always a spot for the dog on the bed, even when there’s not. She places herself in the crevices and negative space. My sneakers like two weathered soldiers saluting the wall, the jeans in the hamper sprawling their legs onto the rug, taking a much deserved break from the day they’ve had. I want to feel victorious, when I wake, when I sleep. I wait for the feeling but it never comes, or it does but not for long, like a flash of lightning, a flash flood only to leave the basement of my heart wet and moldy as I sop along to the next rest stop. All I want to do is rest, stop. But that’d be too easy. Victories must be won in sweat, tears, blood, etc etc you know the drill… Whenever the train blows it’s horn, Bagel runs urgently to meet her enemy. I get it, I have trouble sitting idly by as the echoes of my imagined dangers sound their horns in the distance. I, like her, will stare off into nothingness, convinced I see a shadow, a form coming to breach all my vulnerabilities. Just like her, I too can’t be soothed, convinced that the shapeless form is in fact a pile of leaves, or maybe nothing at all. We need the fear, we’ve fed it all these years and now you expect us to just let it starve? That wouldn’t be nice now would it? Wonderful is the feeling of forgetting to be afraid. Forgetting the method to the madness, letting the madness smile, misunderstood in the back of the theater. I draw the curtain to reveal a symphony who lost its sheet music and instead have decided to follow a trail of ants on the podium, leading to a single Swedish Fish under the stage, bright red as ever, sticky, jubilant, devoured, not afraid.
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