blanket statement

What people like to do, when they find out that you haven't got anyone, is invite you over for holidays, and ingratiate your stray homelessness.

That's right: I said homelessness. Not houselessness, as the current saying goes, but homelessness, because I don't belong anywhere but in the attic, which I chose.

And I pant until the pinkest second to ask to make people pick me up, because I don't want to be homeless for a minute longer than I have to.

How I'm doing? Not very well. But the butcher shop is bustling. How I'm getting? Not on my own. But my neighbor's house is brightly lit.

I should throw a flag unfurled from the window, hang string lights over the fire escape balcony. I should live it up! I should have a ball.

I should have a drink at the bar and think about winking at opportunities. A cough, a sigh, to sing.

And as the snow comes, because the world's not hot yet, there emerges a certain type of promise, when we see that we might have needs, of some normal human type that we had always rejected. Abstinence from the florid, yes, but also: how do you do ?

How do I do ?

MY BASIC HUMAN NEEDS ARE UNMET AND CANNOT BE MET; I AM UNWANTED, I AM FORESAKEN, I AM RESUNTED

So, too, there is of course a padded-wall comfort in the fact, I find, that I am definitionally unworthy of anyone's attention anyway, anyhow, anymore. Somehow, I've run right out: I have no redeeming adult attributes at all. There is nothing left of me to become invested in even if anyone should be swindled into deigning to try.

That's a foul curse you speak, you caster, you slipper through other-color worlds.

You lie. You lie. You lie beneath the blanket, you garb yourself in scold. Your temperature runs with elevated heart rate, nauseous beyond the fold.

Thanks for the company! Beautiful company - we're making and pulling all manner of stops.

Honey, you gotta be human. You gotta be a human. You gotta be a protoplasm, striving on high.

And we're trying - oh, we're so very trying. We're trying to be kind to ourselves. We're just trying to stay warm.