My Cardboard Balcony

by Belinda Roddie This is how it starts: A bottomless pot of tea on an unheated stove. The coldness of a brew that's meant to taste like seasons greetings, but instead the cold water reminds you of salty oceans from small, personal reservoirs. Work begins at sunrise. If you're lucky, you'll feel appreciated for your efforts one out of every twenty times. A compliment typically disappears into a black hole, a gesture of gratitude brushing fingers against a wall. It has been a long time since you've been told, "Thank you," for being where you are. You pour yourself a mug of stale leaves. You read fortunes that are missing both the second and the second to last words, so you don't know if the future is positive or negative. In your living room, it is dimly lit, and frigid. A stand-up comedian reminds you of how silly it is to be human. You laugh, only because you wish you could forget you were such a fragile carbon lifeform. Work ends at sunset. When ...

I am an emotional person. In other news, cows produce milk and vaccines prevent you from getting measles. Yes, it may seem weird that I'm mentioning this. Everyone who loves me knows that I'm emotional. I am extremely sensitive. I don't wear my heart on my sleeve - I wear it pulsing on my arm. There are benefits to this. People can tell I'm genuine, know that I can empathize with them during hard times, and can tell that emotion allows me to be creative and in tune with at least some aspects of the human condition. And while for the most part, especially in a professional setting, I've worked hard to keep my emotional side tamped down, when it comes to moments of stress, pressure, and discomfort, my emotional side can really rear the uglier part of its head. It has not helped that I have a history of being bullied, or that I suffer minor forms of compound trauma due to bad job experiences in the past. So it's been a lot of work to build a shield to deflect...

The Ocean Calls by Belinda Roddie For my sanity's sake, I will swim to England tomorrow.

We were builders once - constructing an empire out of mere shadows, which, once they collected lights, became monoliths of their own reckoning. We forged alliances with angels who wore celestial swords like talons on their hips, and so we crashed upon the chasm of Hell with chariots raging with fire. But then we were dismantled; piece by piece, we were segmented and relocated, and now the deconstruction is complete, and the realm is riddled with never-ending holes.

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.