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thisisit
Just your regular depressed girl who likes pumpkin spice lattes and writing about her feelings.
1k Posts • 206 Followers • 9 Following
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Challenge
Real or Imagined?
"Perhaps we are all fictions, father, in the mind of God." (Graham Greene, "Monsignor Quixote") Prose, please.
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thisisit

Girl on Fire, Redux

I wrote a piece recently called “Girl on Fire.” That night my husband and I watched The Hunger Games, at random, casually, with Jennifer Lawrence giving her all at being defiant and rather one dimensional. I had been watching - not the movie itself, but the fibers of my individual fiction, all woven together, previously published literature. Jennifer Lawrence’s character was referred to as “the girl on fire.” Why does this keep happening? I thought, I wrote that piece and now god is laughing at me.

I told my sister recently that I‘ve lived my life before. That sometimes it gets played forwards, and sometimes it gets played backwards. She told me a few weeks later, nodding her head like a minister saying “amen“ before Jesus: “I think you were right.” I said, “About what?” She reminded me of my belief that I have lived before, and that’s when I knew that this time, my life is being played backwards.

I recently watched an episode of a TV show where they played an obscure nursery rhyme I hadn’t heard in a long, long time. I had dreamt about that nursery rhyme the previous night, remembering my dream only because I couldn’t place where I’d ever heard it, or why it mattered enough that my brain was playing it while I was unconscious. In this episode of the TV show, the main character‘s childhood self runs towards him with a little red wagon trailing behind him, finally recognizing his future version. The exact same nursery rhyme from my dream reaches a crescendo as they hug one another, all connected fibers.

I have realized recently that I have an amnesia about certain things that have happened to me, usually having previously appeared in a dream. I wonder if my life is on a loop, if what scientists are now saying about the universe is true: that it appears to be endless, but is actually ever so slightly curved, a string that is knotted at the end, and not loose, not random, but connected forever, and ever.

Challenge
Ashes to ashes...
"How important is anything that could burn to ash in a few minutes" (Barbara Kingsolver, "La Lacuna) Poetry or prose.
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thisisit

Ashes to Ashes

In however many billions of years, planet earth will cease to exist when our sun explodes. Earth won’t burn, because burning requires a time lapse, and earth itself won’t explode, at least not in the context humans are familiar with, because we will liquidate instantly, our atoms gone faster than any increment of time humanity uses currently.

It won’t be like a Tom Cruise movie or even like an atomic bomb dropping on a city. There will be no time for humans to react, to look up, because it will happen faster than any motion humans can make inherently, more quickly than blinking. You likely wouldn‘t even register the blinding light of it, because by the time the light reached your eyes, every atom that makes up your body will be obliterated, the DNA in your cells unraveling backwards, faster than the back button on your laptop when you click it repeatedly or someone making an Irish exit at a large, uncomfortable family gathering.

Ashes to ashes. In less than a nanosecond of a nanosecond of a nanosecond. You get it. You wouldn’t even turn to dust. Earth‘s life span as a planet will have been insignificant in relation to that of the universe, humanity snuffed out before the breath even reaches the candle.

Challenge
Beyond the looking glass
You didn't worry about the voices in the mirror until something came through... Prose, please.
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thisisit

Girl on Fire

Here's something dark for you to chew on: I've been thinking about angels recently, especially when I was in the ER the other day. The triage nurse asked what brought me in. I told her that my stomach was on fire. She laughed. From then on when they came into my room to check on me, they called me not by my name, but by my rage. Where's the girl with her stomach on fire?

The doctor said that nothing was wrong with me. That all my tests came back normal. He left the room and I saw through the glass window in my door an insane woman locked in the room across from me, banging furiously on the door with a cheap shoe.

She looked strung out. Mouth open like she was rabid, red eyes, dirty, matted hair, teeth that could have fallen out if you just reached out to touch them. I wondered if the fluorescent lights in the ER burned her eyes alive. They say people on m*th can't stand bright lights. I wonder if the nurses in the ER had a nickname for her, too.

I'm willing to bet it wasn't a nice one.

I was still thinking about angels, about how there are two kinds of people in this world. Those who are fine with reality as it is, stone cold sober and happy to merely exist, seemingly never questioning the space they take up. Then, on the other end of that spectrum, are the others: those who will obliterate their entire physical body to match the chaos inside their minds.

Maybe it's religion that makes the difference, why most people seem alright to wait this life out and when something bad happens to them, call it god, no questions asked. Or maybe it's luck. Maybe it's being hugged and told that you are loved. Why was that woman screaming and locked in a room, when across the hallway, I was also enraged, the only difference being that my demons stayed shut up inside myself, and I had never been out after dark with strangers willing to sell their souls for one more hit, one more ounce.

The second kind of people in this world know that angels don't exist, because they themselves have been outside of their bodies, leaving earth, stuck somewhere between heaven and hell at all times, with no one worshipping them or even really noticing their presence, unless it suddenly bothers them or they are paid to do it.

If it is known that angels ascend into heaven, the bright place shot through with light, m*th heads would never want to enter it, because it would set them on fire.

I stared into the glass window on the door of my hospital room, a looking glass that showed not my reflection, but the reflection of a woman entering hell, her eyes not seeing the reality she was so desperate to escape from, clawing at her skin because it was a prison and probably felt enflamed, like it was on fire.

When the nurse came back into my room, she said, "Ah, the girl with her stomach on fire!"

I said, "No, you're blocking the view. The woman on fire is in that room."

Challenge
Tell me how your heart was broken
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thisisit

Heartbreak is on a city street

There's some horrible website that posts videos of people dying by unnatural causes.

Car crashes where the people inside slowly burn alive, men in third-world countries being tortured and tied up on a public city street. Beheaded later. Head on a stake outside of a public market, the flies gravitating towards the sweet smell of it.

A guy I know showed it to me. He said, "The worst part is when they know that they are about to die."

"That they only have a few seconds left to live."

He said, "You can see it in their eyes."

I have lived a life of heartbreak, which, I think, exists only by unnatural causes. Perhaps it dies by them, too.

Where's the video of a person in love, being told, "You're a very nice girl, but I'm interested in someone else?"

Heartbreak is a b*mb detonating. It is not the look someone has before it happens, it is the moment right after, when it's already too late, when they realize that they never had a chance to begin with.

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thisisit

“Maybe you should wear a more supportive bra.”

It's not even a complete sentence, being a woman. When you are born female, you have made a mistake, an error in judgement before it even exists, because it was a mistake you made when you weren't even a fully formed human yet. Just cells dividing, commas forming an endless sentence; there are too many of them and yet you are not enough, never enough.

I'd like to think that this is what I was thinking before my breast exam, but alas, it was not.

I told a doctor, a medically trained professional, that I had a lump on my chest, on my ribcage, and that I wanted it looked at. In that moment, the word "uncomfortable" became a complete sentence. The doctor, a male, looked at me like I had just asked him to strip, or maybe I had revealed an embarrassing secret to him, telling him I was a woman.

It's in my medical chart, I promise. A big "F" next to my name, the grade I was given before I took my first breath in this world.

OK, he says. I need to get a nurse in here, as a chaperone.

Ah, yes, a chaperone. Lovely - a nurse, a woman, who can also watch as a doctor loses some dignity in helping me seek a professional opinion on my physical well-being.

Maybe, if my tone wasn't sarcastic, I could have told him that and he might have felt better about this experience.

It was agony, for both of us. That poor nurse. It was so awkward that I almost burst out laughing. But I've learned that laughing can make a lot of situations worse, like a sentence punctuated with too many commas written in permanent ink, the pause in between each word a life sentence, suspending it and and suffocating it.

Maybe if I had told the doctor that, he would have felt better about doing his job.

Then, I learned that breast exams are not, in fact, his job. He told me that next time, I should go to a gynecologist. An OB-GYN, for people like me, half the world's population; they are considered specialists, when there are dozens of specialists, just not specifically for fifty percent of the planet.

Sorry I'm female, I wanted to say. Let me go back to before my cells started dividing, when it wasn't too late for Y chromosome to make me the correct, less uncomfortable, gender for this particular field of medicine. For you, specifically. General medicine, which I assumed you were trained in, hopefully thoroughly. For I was at a Primary Care Office, but I guess women are Secondary.

That is sarcasm, but if it's true, is it still sarcasm? Or does it become like the awkwardness, felt distinctly by everyone in the room, sentences that have the comma in the wrong place and everyone is looking at you for an explanation.

Why are you here, the awkward silence asked. The comma doesn't belong there, it never needed to exist to begin with. Go away.

After the doctor finished explaining that he didn't "do" women's medicine - I mean, what else could he have meant? he was literally implying that - I said to him, "I thought OB-GYN's were for "this general area" (I pointed at my lap).

No, the doctor said. They're for everything.

My entire gender, shrunk to fit into one field of medicine, when there are dozens of fields of medicine.

Then he told me that maybe I should try wearing a more supportive bra.

Any questions? he asked. All done. Thanks for coming in, but next time, you could spare us both the embarrassment, the awkwardness, by going to the correct place. The place where only women go, like how I imagine men go to specialists to get their testicles checked, and have prostate exams, and exist in the world of men, where they weren't created a mistake when their cells first started dividing.

I'm all done with the sarcasm now, I promise. But I'm still not convinced he wasn't joking, but then I got home, and realized that what had bothered me the most was how unbothered he seemed by the lump on my ribcage. Remember that? Yeah, me neither. Another women's health issue to be ignored, forgotten, erased because the embarrassment was too great and the doctor wasn't comfortable with a body that had fused with the wrong chromosome, that had been born in the maternity ward where being a woman is relevant and they are not the awkward commas.

Challenge
"I want to write a novel about silence. The things people don't say." - Virginia Woolf
Say the thing(s) no one wants to. Any form.
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thisisit

I’m not silent, I’m not even real

You do not get notified when someone unfollows you. But I want a reason. There should be a pop up window that says, "Be honest, why did you unfollow this person?" I could collect the responses like data points, but maybe some of them were from internet robots, and the responses weren't real. I start to wonder if I'm real, what it means when someone clicks a button and I disappear, forever, from their feed.

I like to scroll through Facebook, where I have an account only in order to read the comment sections of politically loaded posts. Some people might call that being an "internet troll." But hey, they posted it. I'm just an innocent bystander, reading it.

I never comment. Complete silence from my little computer, a rectangle I carry around with me like it means anything except that I'm being tracked by Apple, Inc.

I judge them, silently. I am the same person who unfollowed me, the infinite loop of social media. People in the real world can't just press "unfollow" and walk away from someone talking to them. That would be considered rude, but on the internet, you can do that with one click. You have been silenced.

I see people's comments and wonder if they know that they are only one of billions of Facebook users, that they are a single grain of sand in an hourglass that makes Mark Zuckerberg another dollar. If they know that their iPhone is listening to them, pushing targeted ads at them, and they don't question it. That Facebook, and all social media, are constantly changing to better suck us into it, to make us addicted.

Maybe my silence is just as toxic, my laughter at my fellow Americans on Facebook only heard by Apple, Inc., and then later I get a push ad from a mental health agency. Go figure.

But, jokes on them - I can't afford healthcare, like every other American. It's funny, how we throw insults at each other online when most people probably couldn't define the term "algorithm" to save their lives. Who are you talking to, really, on the internet?

Likewise, who are you choosing to listen to?

And maybe that's the point. I'm laughing at Facebook posts daily and the billionaires know that they got me, hook, line, and sinker.

Just because I'm only listening, doesn't mean I am not a part of the conversation about social media.

Challenge
Challenge of the Week CCXXX
The Flash Fiction Challenge: Write a complete story in 500 words or less, focusing on a single, powerful moment. Our editing staff will determine the winner and finalists (judged by quality of writing and interest in content) - who will enjoy the glory of being featured on our Spotlight feed and world-famous, 200,000+ reader newsletter. Ready...go!
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thisisit

A single moment is a virus

A single stroke of paint on canvas. One ball in a hoop in athletics. A word falling out of our mouths, expelling carbon dioxide, invisible, but altering every interaction we have afterwards. I like to think of myself as a writer. The only source of oxygen I have is the written word, hoping it makes me permanent, memorable, alive after I am dead.

On March 11, 2020, WHO declared Covid-19 to be a pandemic. I was in a mental hospital and didn't have internet access, or any kind of canvas. I slept on a cold cot for three nights, which eventually cost me $20,000; in America, health is for those who can afford it, and the rest of us go bankrupt, wondering later if it's a rigged system that only some of us were born to win at.

The nurse told me she couldn't find a vein for my routine blood test. I wondered, if mental illness could be found in a single antibody, would we have a vaccine for it?

When I was released from the hospital I started writing and the words didn't stop coming. Was this surviving, me evolving, or a new era entirely? In the modern day, we turn on our smartphones and scroll towards the news that we believe in. But that's a contradiction, just by definition. It's a loop that we buy into, like our own stream of consciousness. Facts exist, beliefs do not. When you are triaged in the ER for being depressed, the doctor tells you it's all in your head, that who you think you are is not a thought at all, just an illness.

A feeling is, ultimately, an antibody. The world didn't have them yet to fight COVID. On March 11th, 2020, I would wake up every few hours from sleeping, living for the single second upon awakening when I wasn't alive or dead, just a vein that was being poked at without living memory to penetrate it, no conclusive results yet.

Maybe it was on March 11th 2020, that I realized that if I didn't stop it from happening, the virus would multiply, my future one of the DSM-V and doctors telling me it was because my mother hadn't loved me properly.

I didn't want to be a victim, so when I learned that viruses literally alter our RNA, I opened my laptop and decided to save myself in the only way I knew how: by sharing how I felt. Suddenly, through posting my writing, the antibodies were people seeing me, not knowing me based on my medical history, but for the story I was telling. I could literally write my life into a new genetic code that for the first time, I was in charge of spinning.

Vaccines are currently being disputed in America. A future famous writer has yet to be identified. What is fact, where is the vein of life, and how can I turn on that oxygen supply, make it last forever?

Challenge
Whodunnit?
If your birthmark is the wound, who put the knife in your back?
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thisisit

If your birthmark is the wound

Do birthmarks need to be physical, to be considered something that marks us as unique, as special? They say DNA is something we can see under a microscope. Is this the birthmark that matters most? Dementia, Bipolar Disorder, Addiction - these are the freckles, the lines in our skin that we are born with, just not immediately apparent to the doctor pulling us out of uterine darkness.

My DNA snuck up on me, the folds of my brain pulled back when I was a teenager, perhaps god was angry and needed me to be fifteen forever. My birthmark is a dark one, one I had to see a doctor for, like skin cancer festering when we think nothing can kill us.

Perhaps birthmarks come later, and what we are born with is only the blueprint, the blindfold that fate takes off of us as we get older.

It's easy to blame relatives, enemies, politicians for many mental health crises. Blame the weather, your education, the suburbs. Who put the knife in my back, you may ask. Why am I like this? Sometimes the marks on our bodies can be removed with lasers, or therapy. Sometimes we are asked to point out what makes us unique as individuals and the answer is mental, generational trauma fixed in an endless formation of cells, causing us to become a battleground we did not ask for.

Susan from accounting asked me why I have tattoos, when they are permanent, cannot be removed. I asked her why she has children, if it was societal pressure or an actual desire to break the cycle. Maybe the condom broke, maybe I'm just trying to express myself, create a birthmark I chose as an adult.

The blueprint of who we are may be embedded in our DNA, but just as a laser can remove a tattoo we once wanted, maybe birthmarks go backwards.

We choose what stays with us.

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thisisit

Event Horizon

Recently I've been digging into my memory of college, a gravesite I haven't touched in a decade plus.

It was an all-women's college. Navigating the social world of it turned out sour, like a bad sourdough starter.

I don't remember much of it. But recently they've been coming back at 2AM, memories I thought I'd obliterated.

It is a kind of oblivion.

I've decided that girl wasn't me. But what if she's still trapped inside of me, screaming?

I've gotten into outer space recently. Black hole videos, specifically.

There's this thing with black holes called the event horizon. No light escapes it. We can't even see it. If something passes through it, we see it in space, suspended forever in our vision - but it already disappeared, an illusion. It is time bending.

One day, the universe will no longer be able to sustain itself. It will die out, like dreams, and just as unexplainable.

I don't even think my memories of college would make it into space dust.

The girl inside of me, the college version, has already passed through the event horizon. But when is she gone, can that moment please come?

Once a human being passes through the event horizon, they become particles. Every atom of their physical being separates. They are stretched thin, in a long line of their atoms, one after the other in one long string of them.

I like to think of the college version of myself passing through the black hole, after hovering over it. Disappearing but still visible to outside observers, billions of years later. She becomes only an illusion.

The second you pass the event horizon, you die. No one could survive it.

My memory of college is a black hole. Once I start thinking about it, ruminating on it, my memories instantly die, and become atoms that no longer make up a whole.

My memories disappear into something physicists can't even fathom.

If we only become atoms, the concept of us having "souls" and "memories" wasn't even real to begin with.

It has become my escape mechanism, to think of this.

I forgive myself in each atom, over and over again, like they are one long string of rosary beads. But I can't pray, not technically, because I'm no longer a person, I'm a concept, just like praying is a concept. God doesn't exist here, and no one is left to judge me.

I love that.

All that matters, in the end, is that I can be broken apart enough to finally not have to contain myself all at once.

In the end, my memories of college are atoms that disintegrate instantly somewhere inside our universe. Or maybe they have already disintegrated. There's no knowing.

My college memories are suspended forever in the space time continuum, gone even as they seem to exist - but they don't. They're already dead.

I think I can live with that. Maybe I already know that.

And that is what finally helps me fall back asleep at 2AM.

Challenge
Old Souls
(form of your choice)
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thisisit in Fiction

Holding Out Hope

I sat in on the interview. The people we were interviewing were all girls, no guys. It was for a receptionist position at a famous hospital in Boston.

I was moving up in the ranks because my previous coworker, let's call her Ava, was leaving. I got to take her superior seat in the receptionist area.

The last girl we interviewed was definitely not my favorite candidate.

My manager hired her.

She loved to talk. I mean, this girl was on fire with stories. She'd come from a lower position on the floor above us in the hospital. If I were to be unkind, I'd say she "yapped."

She talked about her love interest(s), her family, Iran. Her family had eleven daughters and one son. Her parents had escaped Iran for a better life in America.

That should have been enough to impress me. Instead, for about a month straight, she would update me on her sister.

Her sister was deeply in love. She was pregnant. She was holding out hope for the father of her unborn child, desperately wanting him to love her back. It was unrequited love and my coworker, if talking can be measured in meters, was on her tenth kilometer.

Then came the final update: my coworker told me that she had finally convinced her sister to get an abortion.

She told her sister, "He doesn't love you. He never will - don't trap him."

My coworker was five years younger than me - and I mean, I was young then, too. I think I actually turned my head all the way around to look at her as she recounted the abortion itself.

She said, "I have never seen so much blood in my life." She had held her sister's hand through the entire abortion. Her sister had screamed in pain, and she held on tighter.

Then she took a bite of her apple, shrugged, and answered one of our never ending phone calls.

I think she must have been about twenty at the time. Her sister was older than her. She had held her older sister's hand and told her it was the best thing she could do for herself. Don't trap him. Having his kid isn't going to make him love you.

If anything, he'll resent you.

My coworker turned back around to look at me. She applied her shiny pink lip gloss that made her long brown hair look like a halo.

"Anyway, I told her to let go of the guy. I mean, he clearly wasn't interested."

I might mention here that we worked in the pediatrics unit. Later that day, I was taking a phone call from a patient's parent/grandparent/guardian, and she walked up behind me. She cracked a joke she knew would make me sputter with laughter. She leaned in and whispered it so only I could hear.

I laughed so hard I couldn't speak. I hung up on the parent/grandparent/guardian. So unprofessional.

I turned back around to face her. We were both trying to stifle giggles, to the point that it sounded like we were choking.

"I'm so glad we hired you," I said.

"Are you kidding?" she said. "This job is just to get me to the next one."

Then she smacked her glossy pink lips together and smiled at me, and in that moment, I wished we'd been sisters.