Mid-Week Ritual

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Mid-Week Ritual

It is Thursday and I am tired of being a person again.

I look at my reflection through the steam and toothpaste splatter on my mirror and I start to pick

at my skin. I am racking my brain, pulling on my eyelashes, and pinching at my pores, seeking

some semblance of a response from myself. I keep adding things to my to do list I know will

never get done and I keep losing my fucking pen.

I pause to carve out a small space of solitude in my mind.

Please just give me a small space to die in private each week.

I have no desire to go to the grocery store, to fold the laundry, tidy up every room in my vacant

house, catch up with those I’ve been meaning to see and remember how long it has been, I do not

want to do the dishes, or pretend to be a person for a second longer. I can’t keep engaging in the

façade of normalcy for one more second or any pretense of personhood. I will think of this again

tomorrow and the day after that, fear the coming days of December, wonder why the passage of

time feels like something I never really understand; the days all dissolving in my mouth, their

taste long forgotten.

I have become passive; my mind feels old and stupid.

Let me sit quietly by myself.

I will put on the music I have been longing to hear, dance in my living room to the large voices

and heavy drums of Fiona Apple, and I will think about absolutely nothing. I will put my face in

my hands and savor this intimacy. I will retreat fully and completely into myself.

I’ll allow my thoughts to blend, I won’t try to distinguish among the myriad of lives coexisting in

the pit of my stomach, that all ultimately look the same. I can’t play the mother of the world; I

can’t even be a mother to myself. I want to fall asleep without ever actually closing my eyes.

I will let my thoughts come undone,

like red string unspooling from within, watching as they spill out of me –

I am hungry to know what I will say next before I even know how to say it.

I remember to text back, and I try to tell you that this is how I am feeling.

Lucy James is an avid reader and lover of words, a writer of all kinds particularly delicate with poetry and creative nonfiction. Devoting their life to trying to understand the chaos in everything, Lucy documents how it is for her– based in the Midwest. Lucy’s Instagram {HERE}