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.