World, I finally have a workspace again; mind you, its first role is that of a vanity, but I think it is just as important to apply metaphorical make-up to the soul, just as it is important for a girl who loves to play with lipsticks and the like to apply non-metaphorical make-up to her face and neck.
The point is, the appearance of the mind and heart matter. Inside is important. Thoughts hold weight. And my insides have been without foundation or mascara or eyeshadow primer for months. I’ve been bare and boring. Doing the work of my job, but not my other passions. I mean, sure, I write all day. I apply creativity to projects all day. I work my mind out all day. But there lacks a certain style that is only inherent in the writer’s own laptop, in the comfort of the writer’s own thoughts. Where she manages one project of which she deems truly important when it so moves her.
I felt like I was constantly making excuses for why I wasn’t writing. Too busy, too afraid, too tired, too anything. Making promises to my readers that I would write every week or every month at the very least. But to have a vanity or desk of one’s own. It’s a freedom I haven’t felt in years. I’ve been desk-less for too long.
The Aging
It feels like forever when you’re young,
the kind of forever I wish I had now
that I know what forever means to an adult.
It’s when you lose them you notice. The lack of presence. The inability to reverse forever
so that you may be young and foolish and happy,
so that you may experience love without loss,
family without complication,
relationships without lies.
For me, it was a time when technology represented itself in floppy disks and beepers,
music videos on the television,
classical music playing in my grandpa’s car,
because Tchaikovsky was more appropriate and profound than The Thong Song to the old man
who would never have taken a selfie,
except by accident trying to figure out how this gosh darn phone works.
To be able to reverse the evolution of the chip, the screens,
the flip phones, then memes. To be able to go back to faceless books. Phone calls that were surprises.
Because one day, I will not understand it. The world, that is.
Because technology never represents the aging,
it scares them, taunts them, lays bare their inability to stay updated.
Our human software stuck in version limbo, with not enough space to make the update possible,
and too old of an appearance to stay current.
My grandpa was a typewriter; I, a desktop. The aging daily losing wireless connection to the world.
We wish the people and things that existed, that now confuse those kids
who are the same age now
that you were then,
we wish they never changed.
But progress does not stop;
and aging does not falter.
But yet there is hope:
that we may become so retro,
so hip in our aging
that they willingly bring us back into the world,
because we made a difference,
and can do so again.