They’re all downtown now, and I am still here having been reading and drinking and getting tipsy alone on sake.

There are ways to move rightly in life,
And I believe I have not learned them correct.

I should go but I’m always late anyway so no one will think a thing of it.
And I’m always tired, too, and half falling asleep, except when I’m at work selling my mind and my old schoolgirl skills for money—the skills are still here even though they cease to have any real relevance, I will not return to school I do not think, it would be a cowardly act—so when I’m at work I pretend to be alive, and lively, so I won’t be questioned closely and then asked to leave, leaving me bereft without any money to navigate the world and to float my little pilgrim’s boat.

Where that stupid boat is going I don’t know; and what god I’m seeking after I can’t name, nor do I know if he’s there, and I must confess quite often I tack eastward or west and don’t give a shit if he’s there or not and I often wish him non existence, or swear at least a fight to the death.

I am so many things to so many others and am right nothing to myself; and I have found that while I numbly go through motions of making stabs at self-betterment or self-care, I really don’t care all that much for said self, and despite endless inner conversations that engage all those hating bits of me, I cannot divine why it is that I move stiffly to look after myself: I guess I just don’t like the girl, and that’s that, I have no good reasons, and so some day may kill her somehow through hook or crook; and I’m doing a halfway good job so far what with the sake and Stoli and the illnesses.

And yet on the other hand, you know, you can truly see, she’s trying so hard, and maybe other lives have ended not so right and so she’s trying to make good on this one; and you see she deserves the chance, and you see the struggle, and the fight is a good one, and she’s a strong and otherworldly character to her motions at times.

The way when the neighbor girl was screaming and it was all going wrong there, at three a.m. in the morning, and she could hear the girl’s body being thrown against the wall, and still she went to the door and pounded, and the fighting stopped and silence was crushing;
I guess our eternally arrogant heroine of the story is redeemed only insofar as she likes a good read as well as any other word junkie;
And she’d hate so much to be a letdown, a character you’d dislike.

A life estranged from itself by the distance of the narrative.

Mothers, don’t let your daughters read too much as children,
For ever after,
They will read their lives like stories in need of work,
Plots in need of thickening,
Essays in need of a point,
With characters in need of conflict, or development,
As something to run away to and bury myself in to save me from the world where things are hard and harsh and should not be as such;
And so now the books that saved my life at age ten, now they bury it, and leach away its meanings like waters so long and persistent vanish the resiliency from stone.

And still the indefatigable heroine barrels on.

With full fucking knowledge that she’s completely full of it.

Nonetheless, she thinks, life is mighty interesting, and if she loses you, dear reader, then she’ll probably keep on churning out the lines until they cease to serve her; and for that lack of consideration, she apologizes.