the click clacking sound of my keys

iced americano breaking through a sweet pastry a freshly blown hairdo whipping against my face as it's tousled by wind dietary fiber a pair of headphones connecting the ears of two heads into one folding a dog ear into a library book mango sticky rice perfume roughness of stubble brushing over my collarbone crinkled linen duvets the lightness of pressing against a key on an electric piano removing the safety plastic off a brand new ballpoint pen synchronicity my mundane stuffed fish lost cause by beck friendly middle-aged male baristas

i'm trying to be a little off-the-cuff here, and i'm not sure if i'll be able to succeed. i haven't been able to write anything for a while now, and i wonder if it's simply because i'll have to face truths the second i hear the keys start to click. i've been growing out my fingernails for a month. they make my maneuvers clunky and awkward and slow. my fingernails look so beautiful in their envy, but they stop me from pushing forward. i now live in fear that something will make them snap or snag or chip. i'll have to cut them off and wait for them to grow again. but i like them now, because they're long. and maybe they mean something more. they might be the only part of me that's grown besides my cheeks. i think i'm getting a little fat. perhaps i'm becoming more of a woman. i'm packing up a life i've lived and come home to for 22 years now, still unearthing things from decades prior. picking them up stings my throat as the dust co...

i've made it! i'm on the other end of the finish line. and now, i get to watch the other marathoners sweatily catch up to where i've been resting, knowing this whole time the prize for crossing. i'm golden like a trophy, covered in ribbons, and mounted on a podium. why does everyone seem to be running in place?

sometimes, like other human beings on Earth, i feel a separation pulling my brain from my skull to float above the rest of my body. i'm entirely out of my own, almost like a birdseye lens on a camera. i am both a king and his jester. she looks like rot; haggard and vaporous. it's not necessarily contentment, unless that's synonymous with defeatedness.  there really isn't much that can be done here. so i just watch, marking a star on my calendar for Judgement day.

my LinkedIn profile photo is currently blank. a hollow avatar sashed with a desperate holler for employment fronts the messages i send to anyone willing to speak with me for prideless pandering disguised as "career advice." i prefer to speak over the phone, because i'd rather be fluent in business-casual banter than hastily slap some concealer over parts of me that are dark and sunken. the more time that passes, the more i come to be known as faceless, and maybe less human. it scares me to think that i'll suddenly lose all opportunity to even introduce myself to these people if they knew what i looked like. i can't be faceless and jobless at the same time. but having both requires facing a horrible truth, one that i feel i'd only be immune to if i possessed an entirely different set of features in totality. it's the cost of being a woman, i think, to be prescribed a certain level of opportunity entirely irrelevant to your skillset. if i'm right about t...

if a seagull screamed, "kiss her! kiss her!", how would you react? the worst way you can sabotage yourself is to be discouraged. i will always, always, always, give my ear to you.

i don't really quite understand the idea of letting things go. i can't believe i'm actually typing this out, but i would like to make a reference to a recent purchase of mine as metaphor for this topic. experiences in my life are kind of like a fresh pot of slime. if something feels so good to hold in my hands, i'd rather it actually just tack onto and directly cement to the skin of my palms, and i can center and accustom daily living around my new slimy hands even if i'm making a mess of things. i expect the body heat i radiate to keep the stuff pliable and useable for...ever. the longer it's in my possession, the worse i will feel if it were to dry out or be thrown away or confiscated for distracting my classmates who apparently got desensitized to bare shoulders. i guess this convoluted and terrible metaphor could be more intelligently explained with terminology we've all heard before-- sunken. cost. fallacy. sunken slime fallacy? slunken cost fallacy? su...