twenty years of being lectured about flexibility and giving and kindness and respect and love from stone cold narcissists, from people who were taught at their parents' knees, in their church, across their whole lives, how to deny love and respect and kindness and giving and flexibility to their children. 

there's no way out of the trauma i hold. it will also die with me. i suppose i am learning to see that as a blessing. if it ends in me, when i end, it ends. if it does not end in me, when i end, it ends. 

why do other people not feel so much active conflict in their bodies about being alive in 2025? i am so acclimated to fighting systems, so deeply sensitive to macro movement in all of these structures and how to save my wee micro life from these macro death sentences. ray could not have done anything but live when married to me. i'll die mad at myself because that's what my bones are built of. 

i'm not crazy. i am not well adjusted to a toxic, horrific, consumptive, destructive ecosystem. i will never be well adjusted here. i will always stand at fundamental odds with capitalism, with classism, with racism, with sexism. i will never not be wearing armor. i will never not have my weaponry with me. 

i do not believe there is a way out. i do not believe the only way out is through. i believe we are standing still, waiting. i have always felt myself to be a woman standing still, waiting. waiting for my period, waiting for the next pay check, waiting for the bruises to fade, waiting for that bill to hit collections. standing still in the desert of my body. standing still in the vast, bare baked sands of capitalism. alone. 

try as i might i cannot envision myself as part of the great whole. i sense the body of the great movement, i smell the sweat of the generations and continents of work toward a beautiful future. but i am not a cog in that wheel. i am not a joint in that skeleton. 

and not a standout in the way of messengers, heralds, jesters, performers or musicians. not a voice to be listened to, not a talent to be appreciated, not an offering of a moment of love or joy or community. i am none of these things. 

i stand alone heavy with knowledge. no one stands with me because i stand in quicksand, holding weight, climbing upwards, never falling, always sinking. sisyphus but even upwards has been taken away. there is no path, there are no eagles, there is no sky. 

empty bottles only. the clank of layers of glass in the bottom of the recycling bin, and another added on top. empty hearts only. there is no path, there is no sky, there is no family, there is no self. 

here: only mud, only silt, only the soft slow grub of grains against skin. always suffocating, but this also means always breathing. too hard to kill, too strong to assimilate. i insist upon my right to be ground slowly down into a compilation of molecules. i demand the opportunity to die slowly, at odds with everything around me.