Because the shore is an alarm set just loud enough to break my fugue, I silence it but don’t go back to sleep.
Because I wake with pounding everywhere, the doctor is unsure how to classify the ( ). Because I reclassify my ( ) as boring, I can’t rest long enough to unmatter it from my brain.
Because I cannot rest, I muster up the anti-spoons to spiral out while workshopping. Workshopping, I spiral into pain until it pops and coats me with its whiteworms.
My sister texts to let me know she’s visiting. I let her know she’s visiting without telling her I’m ( ). While visiting, she’s ( ).
We watch light play on the ceiling. We unspool our childhood with our words. She asks me if the ( ) has gotten any better. I ask her if she thinks she’ll ( ) and she says she’ll try. When she leaves, I struggle not to show her the wasp corpse in the eaves. She hugs me, this time without ( ).
In the world, I just keep breaking, stutter, don’t finish my ( ), don’t remember to ( ), question later what I’ve promised, worry which body will encounter all these agreements and if they’ll know how to pull the answers from the ether.
Either ( ) is talking to me or the ( ) is in my ears, either way I need to nod along and ventriloquy my mouth as if I listened. Venting all this hot air isn’t something I’m allowed in public, so I take my hand and pull me into closet, try to breathe the darkness, lose count and category between the dust mites, my own imagined light rays, my leaking marks among the floor smudge. Losing, I–
and bloodfall, a ring of smells I can’t identify, my partner asking if I’m ( ) and I don’t know, only ( ), only wonder and then forget, only hurry and then lose my ( ), start seeing ( ) but then make myself unsee.
Therapy, but ( ). Cherry cough syrup on my clothes and sticky and musk.
Jingyu shares a poem about ( ) and I fall off the edge. Diana only sees 60% but the other 40 lives below my clavicle and can’t be reached without surgery. I tongue my swollen incision site and remember. Despite all the ( ), I tell my partner, today is a ( ) day and he says that’s ( ).
Wasps landing on the windowpane. Today I am un( ), at least as long as I don’t drive. I wipe crumbs from the counter, gather up the laundry from the floor, consider fathering something with my hands.
I leave finished projects for ( ) to borrow and, when I’m asked, I say “Pretty good” and smile with eye contact. A man crosses the road pushing a vacuum and pulling a pitbull. Today I don’t push or pull, only step out of the water clean and—
If you asked me, I’d say I’ve never known the meaning of ( ). Words fly from my fingers like I’ve freed them from a paperweight in a storm. Today, I walk outside among the people and no one knows I’m ( ). When I breathe, I only push the air out of my lungs. I burn my soles on the pavement and let the dried skin crumble off.