Cleaning Day (6/366)

It’s just dishes. It’s just floors. It’s just dusting. It’s just laundry. It’s just vacuuming. It’s just mopping. It’s just switching laundry. It’s just picking up. It’s just cleaning the desk. It’s just mail. It’s just folding. It’s just dishes. It’s just wiping down the bathrooms. It’s just cleaning tubs. It’s just making knee pads from towels. It’s just vinegar and short shoulders straining. It’s just scrubbing toilets. It’s just picking up. It’s just sitting down. It’s just watching shows you don’t even like. It’s just dishes, again. It’s just Saturday. It’s just your only day off. It’s just work tomorrow.

Seven Weeks (5/366)

I knew we would fall in love the moment I shook his hand. I convinced him to join me. He was reluctant. He went quiet during my spring break, my stomach shrinking away from the inevitable. He broke it off the day after I was sleeping in his shirt. I screamed and rocked and cried and he stared as this confirmed his feelings. I couldn’t taste my Nana’s cooking for a week, my tongue dying in solidarity with my gut. Once I was his age, I couldn’t blame him, but I could still hate him for making home food bland.

Boomerang Universe (4/366)

I remember this. I remember saying good-bye to my children, although this time around I am meeting them for the first time. They have teary smiles as they try to hide their sadness from me, but now I can interpret them as tears of joy.

The universe is bowing back to its beginning. Time does not care if it goes forwards or backwards. It does not care when I meet my parents again in this life in 30 years, and lose my children in 50. Paradoxically, it is kind enough to remind me of the terrible fullness of life.

Ghost Realms (3/366)

I don’t listen to ghost stories. I believe in them too much. I think it’s better to leave them alone. I lived in a room where a girl died, no one remembers how, nor how true it is. I not-lit a bundle of rosemary in my smokeless room, telling her that I wouldn’t mess with her realm if she didn’t mess with mine. We all know I would have lost, but I thought I might as well respect her realm. She did end up respecting mine, although some things happened that she couldn’t help. See: the nights I woke “myself.”

Weighed Down (2/366)

How do I even get out of here? There are no chains holding me down. The recesses so dark that they have their own kind of glow. But this is my nest and my cavern where not even bats will join me. They aren’t blind you know, just really bad at sight. As am I, especially in foresight. I should have seen this coming, should have been able to track this decline.

There is only a weighted blanket that I can throw off easily. Maybe the shades will close off the sunshine by themselves, shielding me from my own incapacity.

Bookstacks (1/366)

She towered over me like the bookstacks over her, our mouths clashing together, eager to suck each other in since we both knew the end of our own book was inching closer, page by page, kiss by taboo kiss. The prologue was so many years ago, and I wish we had stayed there. That there had been no beginning to even write about. That our story would have stayed in our childhoods, no breasts sliding against each other almost like a man’s wet dream. We were no one’s wet dream, not even our own. Our pages should have stayed blank.