i eat chocolate chips for dinner the first night i notice my
clock’s stopped working and it could be a coincidence but
i don’t think it is. the first night the clock stops working is
the first one that i don’t have the energy to brush my teeth
or set an alarm.
i write a paper on causation vs correlation for psychology
and mean to talk about autism and vaccines but i really
just talk about the clock. i bring up the butterfly effect,
the chaos theory, and my therapist adds anxiety disorder,
ocd, but the clock is stopped on 9:43 and i was 17 minutes
late to my 10:00 appointment today.
sometimes things break and i let them break more while i
grieve over what could have been. i don’t believe in
precautions until after i’ve needed them. my phone screen
is shattered and my dog is lost and i have no one to call
when i’m drunk in public at midnight.
what i’m trying to say is that if i tiptoe, whisper, hold my
coughs, i can hold the earth together at its faults. what
i’m also trying to say is that the impacts of my mistakes are
devastating every time they’re made, and i don’t think
that will ever change.

catherine windham is a poet from south carolina that spends equal amounts of time writing and talking about writing. she’s been previously published through Over Yonder Publishing and Maybe Later Press. she can be found on twitter and on tumblr at @healingsoft.