Paces

Stream of consciousness tonight...

Paces over carpet, never meant for this type of worn patterns when installed. How many paces have I made in this room in the last 90 days? Attempting to tamper down anxiety and depression as if it were pickles I can sell later on in life. Glances out double pane treated windows to ensure I will not get any natural D3, windows a dozen times a day like a marksman waiting for their lure to appear, until I know far too much about my neighbors. What has changed in the last 20 minutes? Is the sky cloudy? Is it clear? Will we expect rain? The news is no safe haven for sanity. Or even reality. Exhaustion. Stress. Anxiety. Short of breath – oh gods, am I dying? Am I infected? No. Just crushed to the floor by the last 20-foot wave of insanity that rolled across this country in the last three days. Murder hornets. Meth gators. KKK. Rogue murderous police forces. When I spoke to my college boyfriend back in 1998 about how America was in its Roman phase I never really thought it would play out like this. I had rallied with my Philosophy textbook brilliance about the deconstruction of ideals and the ignorance of mankind… I was hoping for an awakening to a beautiful ideal. Not this. Who could predict this? Science fiction and horror writers have tried. They failed. No one saw this coming. Not the way it is playing out now. It reminds me now of my mother. My dear mother suffered from severe mental illness, especially in her later years. She struck her head on a tree branch one day. Never went to the doctor. Covered it up with a ski cap. For months. Until I took her to the hospital one day. The things I saw. The things the doctors had never seen. And then it was revealed that she had 4 kinds of cancer. And she refused treatment. And it dissolved into years of battlement… Is this America? Maybe, but perhaps wanting treatment?