i woke up today
with grief sitting
on my chest
“tick-tock,”
she whispered
i didn’t recognize her at first
though she snagged me and often
these past few years
divorce and pandemic
and the hustle (oh the hustle!)
of a single mama
my birthday next week and yesterday’s mezcal
all the things i’ve said wrong ever
cicadas and wildfires and knob and tube wiring and
92 unfinished projects calling to me in the night like children
and the children!
how they double in size and effervescence every five days as i pray i’m not raising assholes and soon they will be old and gone and i wasted so much time hiding in the laundry room because i couldn’t keep up with the pace of what’s next coming at me like a game of whack-a-mole and the pain of the world makes my own irrelevant and
that’s all it was
today anyway
but she takes my breath
and dangles it
just out of reach
until i name her,
tired of being ignored
so i tell my lover i am sad
i call my mother and marco jerilyn
on a walk through the cemetery
three reminders
(four if you count the ticking clock and i guess i do)
to slow it all
w
a
y
down
until i find my breath
(1 2 3 4 4 3 2 1)
over and over
and remember that i woke up
today.
—
writing through a stuck emotion can be a creative exercise in moving it through the mind and out onto the page, where it can be seen and named.
stuck on something? get it out in your morning pages, or give yourself 500 words and a format that matches the emotion. anxiety showed up as a character in this exercise, which also became one long sentence to match the endless loop of thoughts created by the emotion — circular in that i ended up where i started. angry? TURN ON CAP-LOCKS AND INVITE EXCLAMATION POINTS TO THE PARTY! indecisive? play with choices in a this-or-that format, and see what you can do with creatively placed question marks.
i also highly recommend The Book of Qualities by J. Ruth Gendler. She turns emotions like Pleasure, Terror, Anger and Pain into everyday characters you might run into on the street. one of my all-time faves, and a great format to emulate in your own private writing.
