20 pounds gained
Confidence lost
In myself
And so many around me;
Said goodbye to a job I despised
For the safety of home
And the sake of my sanity;
Love comes and goes
When loneliness overpowers
Willpower.
I haven’t had a haircut
Since my DIY COVID-19 buzz cut
That’s still growing out
And as much as I’d like one
The idea of a stranger breathing
Directly over me
Mask or not
Makes my skin crawl.
Today I applied
For a remote position
Doing data entry for an online cemetery company
Cataloguing tombstones and plot numbers
Based on scanned handwritten records
(I assume)
For half of my last pay rate.
Maybe I’m morbid
But
I think it could be interesting…
Data entry
Of the dead.
The woman in this photo
Seems a stranger
So confident and strong.
I wish I could summon her back now
But that high wave has crashed
And I think the next one
Will look very different
Than they ever have before.
For now I’ll trudge along
In my paint-stained jeans
That barely fit
Doing my best to keep my babies safe
Relying on Zoom
For some kind of
Connection.
I stuck a reluctant toe
Into the murky waters
Of online dating
For approximately 12 hours
Before deleting it all;
The idea of sharing these scraps of heart
Sounds disastrous
Sounds too hard
Can wait.
There are so many books to read
There are so many books to write
There are photographs to take
There is so very much to do
There aren’t enough words to find
There’s a new version of myself
To expose to the light.
by Julie Blue 