btw mourning and birth ! "spare some change for the machines"

i repeated his mantra: treat the symptoms.

/

how many have heard the thunder of escape?

she made a list every morning.
or, at least she had been trying to start making lists; that is to say, this morning she made a list.  a list of everything she wanted out of this day.
the first item was to wake up with a smile, feeling the possibility of a new day.
the second item was to pick up some clearisil before work, her oily skin acting up again.
the third item would have been something about remembering the dog leashes for her second job had she not gone to the mirror to check if anything new had popped up over the course of the night, and finding a minefield of blackheads and fresh pimples, began attacking her face with two fierce fingers and a tissue, checking the contents of each explosion, rubbing together the mix of red and white and even smelling some of the larger entrails.  after several minutes of this and feeling some sense of completion, she looked in her mirror into her eyes, and while avoiding the pink inflammations below, she was struck with a sense that everyone she would see today she had already seen before and knew, as in, she is in acquaintance with: not in a metaphysical sense, in a very physical, real sense.  literally, every person: donna at the bagel shop and her three girls behind the counter, [well, two of the girls were donna's, the third was margaret laboute's daughter, but they all looked the same, brunettes all of them, and all too thin for her (our protagonist) to look at very long without feeling aware of her own ever increasing self mass], there was wayne and derek at the office (a hell so unimaginable that the only thing she conversed with was her excel spreadsheet; her quiet whispers to her computer screen only further distancing her from wayne and derek, who over beers some evenings discuss the very real possibility of ending her life just to never hear her stammer "control 2, d2 plus d3 plus d4," or any such variation again) and the indian gentleman at the gas station (if ever he came up in conversation, and it's entirely possible he only came up in conversation in our protagonists' inner dialog, she referred to him as "you know, the indian gentleman from the exxon," and then she would follow this with "no not the chemist, i mean the guy at the pump," even though she didn't know any indian chemists, she assumed somewhere there must be some and one of those must work for exxon) because she needed gas, and of course, the two dogs she was sitting, cookie and bowie, snippy little fuckers and their owners wouldn't be home.  she thinks, these are the only people i will see today, that's it. she felt this here, at this moment, because it would turn out to be true. or, possibly the other way around: it turned out to be true because she felt it here at this moment.  she wondered if she could change who she was if everyone already knew her.  if she was always that girl, how could she be any different.  she could only be what she was being because thats who she had been.  then she thought about the bagel shop and hairnets and her toasted poppy-seed bagel and cinnamon cream cheese or strawberry cream cheese and she marveled at the choice for a moment.  then she thanked god.