[leave me a note here ⟶ https://ourworldoftext.com/polkadot] 10.17.25 2:23pm everyone is down for a nap but me. baby wore a thnoodle one-suit on our walk today. I consider taking secret tap dancing lessons & emerging a year later as a secret tap dancing virtuoso. I quickly dash my dreams by sharing this small yearn with my school of fish. a very nonchalant search for a unicycle on facebook marketplace takes place. 10.16.25 11:45am I attended therapy in my pink Nick & Nora sock monkey pajamas (flex) & then curled back into bed. (flex.) Pebble & I played hair tie soccer & I had three glasses of milk for breakfast like a freak (derogatory?). At night, or in the quiet of my car before any music starts, or driving home from line dancing, ears ringing from music played so loud I couldn’t hear my own boot stomps, I can feel something heavy & clawing in my throat. Sometimes it stops me in my tracks doing laundry. Knocks the wind out of me until I imagine I look like a gaping fish caught in a brine pool. really, I’m sure I look like I’m cradling a load of fresh laundry that smells like vanilla, ginger, & vetiver. Saying goodbye is hard. Being spread out over the country makes it harder. But, I also do the circle jerk (a frenetic circle dance the closest I’ve gotten to tap dancing in a while) & let out a high pitched squeal as I hitch turn hitch turn shuffle shuffle turn TURN HOW MANY TURNS WHAT WALL AM I SUPPOSED TO FACE okay I know this part :) & I put out mums & a pumpkin I carved full of stars & a little skeleton frog our neighbors gifted us, & I sing Silver Spring to baby as I feed him Mac&cheese w peas, & I switch out the flowers in the bud vases scattered around my house. (Mary & I cut as many flowers as we could muster before the first frost. The bees knew. The bees were sleeping in the flowers.) I’m trying to be at peace with the sadness & the stillness & the busyness & the fluster of life right now. The shortening of days… Pebble is currently purring, a polite puddle on the small of my back. She is so warm :’) Audrey scratches my back & we tear up in the check out line at giant eagle holding great big pumpkins & frozen pizza. 10.11.25 1:22pm @cortnet, your observations of big cat & small cat bring me so much joy. @roowho, your sweetener extravaganza leaves me with similar questions. if your investigations bring forth any further data - which coworker or *WHY* they keep this strange trove of treasures - please keep us little fish up to speed. 10.11.25 1:13pm My calendar fills up exponentially with craft, movie, line-dancing, presentation, pumpkin carving nights… I hungrily lap a friend’s words up & am successful in recruiting beautiful people into our pond (!) I am thinking about wood & gifted crisco. The fall foliage creeps in & I know, if I don’t pay enough attention, I’ll look out the window & the whole world will be #D4480C. A grasshopper with yellow legs crossed my path as my grandparents & I pick the second most tomatoes I’ve ever seen. (The first was two summers ago in the great tomato summer of 2023, as I refer to it to Jennifer & Chuck.) Men heckle from the community garden gates & I feel conflicted at how skilled my muscle of sonic dissociation is as I focus on cutting the vine in front of me & almost slit my neck into a trunk with a gash for sap as my grandma passes me the machete without looking. She spills the chili & we clean up the chili & we put our hair into hot rollers & hers are much neater than mine & we put up a sparkly spiderweb fastened to command hooks, & I remember how my grandmother told me once that she measures her life in how many springs she has left. We leave in the morning with cardigans & she dreads the coming arrival of the frost. The geese fly to where geese fly, & I mourn the vagrant’s fate. 10.07.25 9:49am I attempted as much ruthless spirit as I could muster as I sorted through all my socks. the urge to watch over the garden wall hits me again. I have new friends & I suspect they bring in my trash cans when L & I forget. Pebble steals the sourdough out of my grocery bag of dry goods — titled so to justify my belated putting away of it all. she gnawed two holes into the plastic bag that holds the loaf and @tamping found her under a chair with a whole slice in her maw. she had picked out for herself. her taste, immaculate. my poor raccoon baby’s belly, seemingly okay. my girl has as much skill as defying a desire as I do. I went to kiss the forehead of my love as I swept out the door and discovered an empty bed. this work business is ruthless stuff (moreso than my trashcan full of fellow-less socks. it is so hard to discard them when every sock contains the potential to become a puppet.) 10.05.25 12:57am I once tweeted “I’ve been tucked in once & I have a problem.” I think of this as I tuck a pink blanket into-under the sides of my friend on my couch. It’s comfier than my bed, & she makes it look comfier by being her, hugging the bear I made a year ago & named “Bogby,” because he yearns to one day live in a house in the bog. (I don’t know what the moral implications are of making a teddy bear yearn, but it’s too late to fix now.) I kiss my friend on the forehead goodnight. tuck all the doors into their beds & Pebble comes out of hiding to pester(affectionate) me for love & a treat. I oblige of course, & she is now perched on the windowsill beside me. She waits for her father to return home. Sometimes, I am always waiting for my lover to come home. Pebble fell asleep on my belly for a while. I tried staying very still for a very long midnight while. moved a millimeter to make her more comfortable. heartbreakingly she got up & is now asleep on a sweatshirt my love got me with three raccoons on the front. (“it’s us!) I wait for my ears to perk up at stones and gravel into dirt But fear I will be too asleep to hear its noise that says "I am home" 10.04.25 the world tilts its body & opens its jaw to reveal the first cavities of fall spotted in its teeth like spinach, a new leaf unveils itself in the kitchen window every day shining in its newfound color (something like this: #c37021) 10.02.25 Another year under the sun & it’s time to buy nutcracker tickets again Which means (approximately) 13 weeks left in the year. Time to get those Thanksgiving tickets bought, gift-wrapping picked out, kitty food reordered in bulk. This week, I let the world drown out maggots I had found in the trash can. dumped their swollen little baby bodies into the leaves. Felt bad for these waterlogged white moons, some of them still clutching each other in the litterfall... I wanted to be a forensic entomologist in middle school: measure the units of time spent in decay by the shape size color of innocent baby bodies that simply eat and eat... It would make sense to me that they'd be blind but in all honesty, I don’t know as much as I would like about anything. I've never had to work around corporate America or deal with PTO before which, I guess, it’s a blessing that we dance around now But I miss my love. Sometimes I see him only once in a whole day to kiss his sweet sweated forehead, whisper I love you, and run out the door. In the meantime I bring the trash cans out and wait longer than I should to bring them back in hold a baby who has cried & sweated to be without me & look into eyes that stare widely into mine like a little billy goat as he hiccups up his milk (he is so hungry) his body is only the length of my forearm but growing longer every day sometimes, I wish my whole world fit into couplets 09.22.24 painted my bathroom in dill #788D60 i prepare for darkness & decay we want so badly to believe that celebration on equinoxes & solstices are ancient but really, most of the parts of the year drenched in tradition & celebration fall pretty consistently a month *after.* there is something sensual & sumptuous about the year being broken into perfect quarters. (a quatrain) but we really only feel the effects of the earth tilting into the sun or the shadow a month after I told baby of this on one of our bi-daily walks: to watch for the changes... they're happening every day now. he slaps his jaw when he eats the doctor means this is a sign of new teeth. 11.02.24 i'm looking for a second-hand unicycle on facebook marketplace. it’s october country - gil scott-heron season - & i borrow from the library and promise to return on halloween. Your Flag Decall Won’t Get You Into Heaven & I go a whole week without texting love because it was there cradling me in the nook of his arm, full of crab cakes, done the right way. (old bay, lump of crab, - is it hermes he wears? - all seared on an un-buttered skillet: he fills my kitchen well.) we dress as luke & lorelai to the party & i fill a coffee mug named "Give me coffee and tell me I'm pretty" with two protein shakes, to make up for forgotten meals. these friends do acro and smack each other's ass; smell of akigalawood, bergamot, carrot seeds, cardamom, lavender, leather, musk, orris, and sandalwood. Natalie played sexy spaghetti in a local production & I feel the urge to practice juggling again. 10.14.24 goodbye to the ferris wheel. i experiment with lipstains & avoid medical bills. we are big jacketed and carpuscular. 10.13.24 the year of (!). my godson runs rampant and chews on my leg. I am not OSHA compliant and neither is the bell tower i climb i get paid to climb the bell tower and eat subway while outside drunk people dance. christmas with the in-laws means a war in which i can win without deception with the perfect twice baked potato. well underway, the entrance of moo dheng, pesto, & little caboose into my life. my insides leak outwards. i know the joke man by name. on my way to get the weekly 12 dollar bundle of flowers he tells me the real punchline is the time his wife punched him in the face. coming on a year of the birth of the elipses. my existential kink. of learning not everyone’s dad has a car flask. all my friends’ christmas presents live paper-bagged in my room’s corner, and (when i remember to take the recycling out) the whole apartment smells of vetiver and sandalwood. 09.21.24 we confused love and pity. i unclogged the sink with a snake drank and that shit smelt mildewy. i will one day be grampused with shit from the shower drain. it will spurt up at me in opposite of the concaving of a bullet riddled jello cake. sent my charlotte bananagrams & thought about painting my nails. watched a season of girls instead. 09.09.24 the metal arm wrest transfers a chatterbuzz into my bottom molar’s jaw 09.07.24 dreamt about zombies again. strayed to find blueberries and got terribly lost. found, i had a feeling that i’d be able to be useful to them if i could figure out how 06.03.24 lately, i haven’t had to make anything up. six trash bagged woven crows hanging from power lines like laundry.