My Cardboard Balcony

Wish Me Luck by Belinda Roddie Wish me luck, for I go down a new road tomorrow, one I do not know how to navigate, and the distance only grows between my knowledge and my comfort. So many friends and loved ones proclaim to me that I have their support, and I'm grateful for it. Still, though, I'm used to planning three times over, to having a map or stroll down the path just to get a feel of it. But now I have to learn to improvise, to understand that while I may be hit with criticism, most unjustified, I have to forge myself a spine of steel, something to overcome all of the feels.

"Hey, you two look like you could be twins! Are you two related?" I force a smile and lean my back against the cold glass of the bus stop, while my friend Jessie keeps looking at her phone. It's true that we could be mistaken for cousins or even siblings, but twins? That just seems a bit too much.

Sometimes by Arden Roddie sometimes,             just existing                         is enough.

If Only (Panacea) by Belinda Roddie perhaps this can all be alleviated with spiced tea and gingerbread men, all dancing with their buttons sewn on tight, the smells as rich as a baker's wet dream, allowing me to momentarily forget

They told me it would be easy. They told me it would be fun. They told me I had the support I needed and I'd definitely get this done. They lied to me - it was nightmarish. They lied to me - it was Hell. They lied so harshly through their teeth that it sounded like whistling bells. Their words will never comfort me; they do not meant a thing. And before everything goes mad, I plan on escaping.

The Alternative by Belinda Roddie When the pressure runs deep, and the fever pinches both sides of my head like raw dough in summer heat, there's the urge to ignore the endearing tone of a loved one, who urges me to remember the sun shaving its upper lip with the cold, silver razor of the horizon. It's easy for people, who stand where the breeze hits them at an angle that warms their bones rather than freezes them, to tell me that things will get better. But I retort that taking it one day  at a time doesn't help much when every hour feels like an eon on my brow, and every minute laces its fingers around my heart and squeezes the arteries so that all reason is backed up in my lungs and spine like excess fluid, every second takes another inch off my height, another week off my life. You view the shore ahead of me and what appears to be a clear, blue sea, but the foam is sticky, steeped, heavy like molasses. ...