Freewriting
the thought of you is consuming me
even as I consume content
on how to communicate with you.
I won’t turn on the camera—
the perception of being perceived
is too much.
I’m avoiding you like I do everything:
dressed like a street urchin
for plausible deniability,
streaming lofi beats I had to Google.
and if you’re going to know me,
I should admit I started before I started—
a false beginning, a pipe-clearing ritual
that even feels cliché.
this is why I hate freewriting:
once it’s down, it’s down.
you have to deal.
like the lasagna and gnocchi
and Ben & Jerry’s,
once swallowed,
it demands revisiting.
you dig for the origin,
even if you never wrote it in ink.
eventually I have to decide:
deletion or graduation?
if I can’t bleed in Comic Sans,
it doesn’t deserve Garamond,
Georgia, or god forbid—
Times New Roman.
never a Word doc
until it’s ready for submission.
god, I miss print entries—
I knew the weight of paper,
how impressions mattered
in the hand.
linen to cotton ratios—
a knowledge I later translated
to bedsheets,
never knowing till then
that you could see sunbeams through
the ones I’d grown up on.
WELL NOW I'M IN CAPS LOCK
so much for writing
with my eyes closed—
this is how I go sideways
looking for a shortcut and end up
taking the hardest road
to tell the story.
maybe that’s not it—
but it’s what I’ve made of it.
I can’t say I hate it anymore.
I understand now:
even this can be a tool.
Copyright © Jaymee Thomas | Year Posted 2025
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