I’m oscillating
Between the sterile, serene rattle of hospital HVAC
And the sensory symphony of the garden
Both singing the same song
Of self-love and healing

A stark juxtaposition
My favorite kind
Watching the fiery orange feather celosia
Frothing in the breeze
Like the orange sherbet and Diet 7-Up
Of Karen’s famous orange freeze

A wordy meditation
Had me astral projecting into Successory “art”
Alongside a Costco TV and laminated platitudes

But now I’m in it
Body, mind, and spirit
I can smell the metallic water
As it swirls around the winding chasm of rocks
I can almost hear the bald cypress knees
Sucking up the oxygen into their spongey peaks

From the hospital
To the actual fucking Zen garden
Listening to some cheesy first dance song
Floating over the cicadas that separate me from
The upper middle class bargain seekers
Getting married in the garden on some
Thursday afternoon in August

Coexisting with the ducks and the trad wives
The starving koi and the recent retirees,
Enjoying their blue collar pensions.

I suppose I did end up living my own version
Of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s tome
Maybe not as Gen X as I envisioned
Certain not as Ivy League
Just as disgruntled or at least as disgruntled as I remember it
Frozen in my teenage brain
The same one that longed to rebel
But couldn’t open her legs long enough for some textbook trauma

Instead I found it in the Good Book
The one that was betraying me all along
But it came with safer boys
Or so it seemed
Or so I was told

I wish I could continue to write like this and it mean something
Something to someone else
Enough to elicit some praise, some discourse
Anything to feel more connected
And at least slightly better than that fifteen year-old
Crying in her bedroom over fake accounts of lives worse hers
Washing it all down with the praise of some pedophile
Code switching between sarcastic and aloof
And whatever version of a pupil those men were looking for in me

Twenty years and millions of versions of myself later
I’m still code switching between sarcastic and aloof
And the version of a pupil I know I need to be
To move past all the isolation
And burn out
And cortisol
And social media
And trauma
And bad parenting
And bad religion
And the punishing existence of participating in a society that needs me to hate myself
To keep the ticker moving

u/b***p**** joined r/howtonotgiveafuck