05/10/2026
*~* 86 the toxic positivity too, please. *~*
The spring morning arrived soaked in rainwater and shadow,
clouds hanging low beyond the apartment glass,
the sky outside bruised dark as wet slate.
Rain threaded itself down the windows of this stone fortress of an apartment block,
turning the world into streaks of gray motion and blurred headlights.
My dog slept against my leg, warm and heavy,
breathing with the kind of peace I can no longer seem to locate inside myself.
Coffee cooled beside me.
The apartment carried the stale hush of shared walls and closed air,
that strange lifeless silence buildings hold
when hundreds of people are surviving separately only feet apart.
And there across my knees,
my notebook opened like a wound.
I expected poems.
Instead, page after page,
I found survival.
Not metaphors.
Not fragments of longing stitched into language.
Not landscapes pulled from wool and memory.
Not the woman I used to be
when my hands still reached instinctively toward beauty.
Numbers.
Gas bill.
Late fee.
Groceries.
Dog food.
Minimum payment.
How long before overdraft.
What could wait another week.
What pain could wait another week.
Every penny written out before me
like a battlefield map made by trembling hands,
a desperate architecture of remaining alive.
And sitting there beneath that storm-darkened spring sky,
inside this concrete hive of exhaustion and fluorescent loneliness,
I realized the true weight of survival.
Not the version people romanticize from afar,
where struggle becomes inspirational once viewed through distance and comfort.
I mean the real thing.
The slow dismantling of a person from the inside outward.
The way poverty colonizes thought until joy itself begins to feel reckless.
The way mental health hangs by threads already frayed thin from carrying too much weight for too long.
The way the nervous system forgets how to soften,
because every moment alive feels tethered to calculation.
I have crossed quietly into that class now.
The one that measures existence in transactions and postponed payments.
The one where rest arrives coated in guilt.
The one where survival consumes so much psychic space
that wonder cannot find a place to sit.
I could feel my sadness deepen turning those pages,
realizing this notebook once held poems,
and now held evidence.
Proof of narrowing.
Proof of fear.
Proof that somewhere along the way
my creativity had been forced into accounting.
People speak often about choosing joy,
as though joy were simply a discipline of perspective.
But eventually survival changes the chemistry of the body.
Eventually the mind stops opening doors it cannot afford to walk through.
Not because the heart has become cold.
Not because tenderness disappeared.
But because exhaustion has eaten every spare room inside you.
So there I sat while rain dragged itself down the apartment windows,
my dog sleeping peacefully beside me,
staring down at the ruins of what used to be poetry,
understanding with terrible clarity
that I am no longer writing about living.
I am writing instructions
for how to survive it.
