Photo by Clarissa Watson on Unsplash
Do it. The child you were needs it.
Wake up late and stay in bed, turning
the sheets like strata, like waves
lazing over your lazy thighs. Don’t
bother with the to-dos or must-bes
and just shimmer. Get up and brew
the coffee you always thought would
be so good, but tastes bitter, and add
cream, maple syrup, tip in just a bit
of whisky, and say “fuck this day.”
There are things you have to do.
Don’t do them. Sit and draw a horse.
Don’t exercise. Play. Eat ice cream
and arrange your stuffed animals
in a circle. Serve them tea. Make sure yours
is sweet. Have that conversation with them
you’ve been meaning to have: where you
apologize for how you’ve abandoned them,
and let them love you as only things you’ve
imagined loving you can. Your toys are not
toys. They are limbs of emotion, like people, and if
you leave them alone too long, it takes a while
for it not to feel silly as you talk with them
again. Shame is the enemy of curiosity.
If you listen, really listen, their voices come back.
They start to tell you about places you’ve
never been, about things you want with
a ferocity that scares you sometimes. They make
sense. Sit with them on the couch and watch
a movie you know is bad. Laugh all you want,
but if you don’t let yourself love how silly
it is, that you have spent all this time on
groceries and appointments and meetings
and neating up, you need to recall you have plenty
of time to scrub and launder, to make this farce
you don’t even enjoy look real. Look at their glass
eyes, and see what’s reflected. Convexity
makes for a broader vision: not the small thing you
are, but the immensity of what you could be.
Oh, my sweet self, oh, my sweet other, won’t you leave
this day? It won’t love you like I love you: it only wants
that you do. I don’t want anything but you.
Kate Polak is an artist, writer, and teacher. Her work has recently appeared in Plainsongs, McSweeney’s, So to Speak, Barzakh, The Closed Eye Open, Inverted Syntax, and elsewhere. She lives in south Florida and aspires to a swamp hermitage.