WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and share advice, pootie pictures, favorite adult beverages, and anything else that we think might help. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?
I pick away at the story. Maybe a novel. There is so much encouragement here. No computer of my own yet. I have no idea what to buy. Sometimes I see a flicker of an image, although I’m not sure yet what order it falls. Writing is always this way for me.
My first kitchen accident at work. Dinner for a guest. A super heated pan. A day’s worth of sleep deficit meant I wasn’t paying attention and I picked it up. Curious, how long I was able to hold the metal, as though my brain didn’t register the pain at first, the latex glove melting onto my fingertips. I finish my shift with gauze wrapped around my left hand and realize how lucky I am, to feel pain after a burn.
Loki-kitten discovered his favorite bags are conveniently from the liquor store. He curls up and surveys his territory from inside while I mix a shot or two of gin and read some new nonfiction or watch British telly—Prime Suspect, for now. Sometimes I am home early enough to make coffee for my partner, who lives 9-5 but once held jobs like mine, in hotels, in assembly lines. I have so little time to do these simple acts. I fantasize about domestic life: time to do laundry, shave my legs, do something with my hair. I don’t know how coffee makes up for his dispelling the body horror nightmares that come when I am fatigued. Lately, there are spiders: white and cloudy, like sand polished milky-quartz and I said, face turning brittle and buzzing from caffeine: please, there are bugs on the comforter, and he tucked me in and said he would take care of them.
If I take inventory long enough, just under the continuous exhaustion a 74 hour workweek brings, is the creep of something like relief, but closer to defiance. I will be 30 this November, and I refuse to spend another decade in an industry with no advancement opportunity. My current hotel can’t even spell my name correctly on the contact list. I wonder how I will feel that day, what the last sleeping sunrise will bring? I will lose my insurance, most of my income. The insurance makes me the most nervous, as my partner has a theory that my body is held together by stress and in some quantum subatomic whatever he’s probably correct: little waves of screaming string.
I don’t know what it is to work during the day. I don’t have a connection to the rhythm of people. Maybe I sell myself short about this: today I made a good trade at the library. I’d withdrawn a copy of Dimebag Darrel’s biography from the collection because of water damage. I traded it to a goofy shadow of a teenager, a volunteer, and in exchange she read picture books to excited children.