Still Alive

Not that anybody’s asking

It feels…dusty in here.

As if I fell asleep at the keyboard and woke up with QWETYASDFGZXCV imprinted on my cheek, except nowadays it would just look like a bunch of squares. No characters, just flat squares.

I used to follow the writers, here, who followed me. If I missed you, forgive me. So many, now, are bots. Even the ones that pay for membership, some of them, aren’t really part of the community. I try to keep up; if you comment — I mean, really comment, so I know that something I wrote reached a brain — I want to follow you back. I want to read what you write.

But I also want to create and nourish my own space and not treat it like the poor plants I alternately overwater and forget on my windowsill. This site was meant to support that. But it can’t. Not if I neglect it like last November’s disillusioned poinsettia. That crimson flower now desperately trying to go to seed, knowing it won’t see next Christmas.

But there are other plants on the windowsill. Hardier plants. Healthier plants. Plants that are hard to kill, like a good idea or a poem. Plants that put down roots along a delicate tendril curling up the blinds, seeking sunlight, drinking the humidity from the air itself.

Plants that aren’t delicate, otherworldly, and needy. So needy.

Which reminds me: Time to go water a poem.