Yes, you are, in fact, getting older.

Wiser, oh hell yes.

Prettier? Depends on who’s asking.

Who is asking? Who’s even looking?

The room echoes in on itself, so she turns back to typing on her navy blue lap top.

She’s a Family of One—

who must cook like a housewife, fold like one too. Love like the one and only, fuck like a mistress, work as if she were fully free. Nurture like a mother, nurture like his mother, nurture it all. Nurture the young, nurture the sick, the poor, the broken, the wounded, oh and then yourself—backwards and in heels.

Sitting in an empty Sunday, fresh off cancelled plans—

forcing myself into relief since the alternative is disappointment. “Meanwhile, the world goes on” Mary Oliver would say. Well okay Mary, where’s my place in the family of things? She sighs.

And she writes—

and makes pink eraser art for fun and drinks black seed oil for her joints now, and does facial massages to help with her smile lines, and eats minimal cheese, whatever that means, and does the latest workout craze called “stretch dancing” (where she dances in her living room while trying to touch her toes). Self-invented, patent pending.

This is a life—

a season of this life at least, cause why not. It’s all pretend anyway.