Welcome to Gaia! ::

Mood: what?
Listening to: me
Reading: Victorian Internet
Drinking: I have no hands.

Locking up for the night. There's comfort in the weight of the keys, nine obsolete, two my mother's, six belonging in another country (an old friend's idea of keepsakes; not what I call keepsakes, not sweet enough to be keepsakes, but I didn't say anything when she handed them over, her face shining with the pleasure of unwanted symbolism), one that is wearing away around the serrated edges where I have jammed it into its square-peg hole the wrong way over and over and over. One door, that's what it means, nothing more, because my soul has no windows.

I know, in a way, that I'm furling in on myself; that every word is a stone, mind like a cracked wooden bowl, the dark brackish water overflowing the edges so that crows can quench their thirst. An old story: clever, clever little black hands from the sky. Nature abhors a vacuum, was I not a vacuum? And now: words. Isolation. I'm safe, they're safe, win, win, everyone's unhappy but me.

I had a victory today, on paper, in lines and numbers sancrosanct. Like one of those damn birds hitting the wall of my glass castle with an unpleasant thud and then, voila, dead on the porch, a present for the cats who like uneasy mental neighborhoods. Wing broken, stunned, oozing a little by the time I came out. The feathers raw, the little downy body imperfect, flattened. A victory of numbers (windspeed, friction, pressure, how much does it take to crush thin-boned skulls?).

But every night I lock up and locking up means locking out the victory with the birds. Time to lock up. Time to lock up. My hands don't wrap neatly around the doorframe any more, the sinusoid line of my knuckles crooked along the edge of old wood, green paint peeling. I don't know whether I've outgrown it or it's outgrown me.

At least the key still fits.