I wake to the small black box
warm in my palm—
a pacifier humming its blue-white lullaby.
I promise myself a morning of stillness,
yet within the first inhale
I’m scrolling the dark canal of headlines,
tugging each sorrow closer.
A professor once said cliché
is merely emotion we’ve rehearsed until numb.
I don’t remember if he taught at Occidental
or if I invented the campus to lend my doubt authority.
The phone glows—
a hole punched through the day.
Inside it: woodchucks who can’t chuck
because they’re medicated,
influencers hawking serenity at list price,
my own unfinished sentences
circling like fish that forgot the shoreline.
(Sometimes I think about
capitalist rodents
on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors
and wonder if they’re okay.)
I set the device down.
Outside, afternoon ripens into cut-grass dusk,
one dove tacking the sky to the power line.
Hands bare,
I feel the ache of what’s missing—
a silence shaped exactly like my attention.
I press that silence to the page
and wait to see what rises:
a first shy word,
then another,
until the screen darkens,
and something that is not a product
begins to breathe.
Photo by Ricardo Morales on Unsplash