This morning you can file me under “hot mess.” Surely you know what I mean, you with your hair standing on end, your nails broken and your belly overflowing with leftover Christmas candy. Oh, I am talking about myself. But then that is all I can talk about.

My words belong to me and to no one else. They are designed to make abstractions of the real. That is what life is about, always. Abstract art that no one would buy in a million years.

I have pretty much left society, never having belonged in the first place. I just “thought” I did. You see, thought is a killer of the real and emotions attest to this in an inauthentic way.

I cannot write how I really feel. That is for silence to reveal.

My mother told me that I used silence as a wall. It should have hurt, but it didn’t because she hit the nail on the head. I would talk more but then I wouldn’t be me.

Talking is one thing. Writing is another. Real is one thing. Abstractions are another.

I am not sure how I have managed to get through life without chocolate, silence and then more chocolate and more silence. I could write a song about it, but that would just be another abstraction. Giggle.

Vicki Woodyard