Author: [[Amy Argentar]] --- # Performance notes *playful, stopping and starting, unsure, but also, yearning* # Thai food I ordered Thai food because I was bored. So bored that my thumbprint had pixelated into phone screen membrane morph. The apps haven’t done it for me yet and that’s probably because I deleted them all. Every last one. Just scrolling on nothing, treadmill brain, run until the lactic acid burns bubbles up my spine and into my cerebellum. Run until little footprints form between the eyes. Run until your brain looks and feels exactly like that fake one they made out of jello and noodles during your elementary school Halloween party and damn it really did feel like a real fucking brain didn’t it. Run all the way back to that memory and run all the way back to now and run all the way back to that memory and run all the way back to now until it feels like the Fitness Gram Pacer Test a little too much so run back to when you had to do that and put that memory in the garbage. Run away. Run until nothing matters. Run until the winter air dries your lungs like they were never meant to breathe in the first place. Run until the shallow breaths become tide pools of oxygen and wait for the tide and wait for the tide and then when you finally get a full inhale realize what you’re running from. Opposite of relief, exhale at the next mile marker. Running hasn’t done it for me yet either and that’s probably because I don’t run. I just sit here on my phone with the posture of a protozoan fossil. I just sit here, bored, until I remember I live in a magic world. A magic world where I press the screen a few times in a specific order and then there’s drunken noodles and tom Ka at my door, steaming against the snow. And I run down the stairs. I run back up the stairs. I plop the bag down on my desk with Outlook on the screen and and the blanket on my lap and the power line outside the window and the tissues on the floor and the book on the floor and dust in the bunnies and the bunnies ate the dust and the tortoise won at the end of the day so there’s hope for us after all isn’t there and the paper bag is standing at tired attention like how I imagine all soldiers to be and my stomach is growling and my heart is growling and my hands are growling and the pipes are screaming and the heater is not on but the candle is lit and burning a flame so unmoving and so forever it could be a painting and the candle definitely does not go with the smell of Thai food but if it looks like self care and walks like self care and quacks like self care then it’s self care RIGHT? I don’t even want to go home. I want to become the night sky. And it makes me want to throw up. No not like that but also a little like that because the throat always remembers. The throat always has open arms and broken wings when something it sent away comes running home, and my mother tongue is simply all the words I let dissolve. So I let the thought dissolve. I exhale. I reach for the drunken noodles. The staple catches on the sleeve of my hoodie. It does not want to let go. <br> Boredom not as a lack but as overwhelm add stakes make the app thing work make the dust bunnies talk and make the trying to let go of everything theme more prevalent