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}

Self Portrait in Narrative

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Self Portrait in Narrative

Lucy J.

There is a small white scar

Almost invisible, hugging the right side of my knee

i used to play basketball with my dad

i slipped, slicing my knee open

i think i slipped, smooth and stinging

i think i slipped, i have always been light on my feet

i think i slipped, foul play is part of the game i never learned

i think i slipped

i think

i am six years old, face first on the edge of the court

learning how to speak again, while you

are spitting red into my tired lungs

i slipped, over half healed ridges from the time before.

as you walk inside, leaving me to study the blood and dirt

i begin to whisper to the insects unfurling around me

watching them creep and crumble and curl

i begin to speak because there was no one there to hear me

I am 24 now, at the edge of my seat

Listening through clenched fists and grinding teeth

I am watching you tend to the child that is both of our second chances at paternal love

And I am realizing now, your laughter

Is a metaphor that has lived on the tip of my tongue for years now

i am weeping silently,

creeping and crumbling and curling

contorting my body in ways i did not know possible

i am asking you to stop

i am waiting for my turn to speak

I am begging for you to try with me once more

And what I ask of you to realize

This is only my recollection of the memory.

I am humanizing you,

In this recreation of myself

I know, I too could slip into that delicate darkness

A slice of you that is braided into my blood

So instead, I tend to it as you would a cut

Too tender to touch.