No Prompt Necessary

Tell me about it. No, I’m serious tell me all about it. I’d love to hear it. And I’d love to help. Let me carry this for you, let me help you understand why you reacted this way. Let’s use gentle words and “I feel” statements and let’s figure out some tools we can have on hand to regulate our emotions better. Why don’t we name that trigger? Why don’t we pull that trigger? Why don’t we see what childhood memory or infantile wish is expressing itself through that trigger. Why don’t we do something about it. Hey, I have an idea, maybe your mom can’t take accountability for bad behavior, and maybe that’s why you get so defensive when someone tells you that you hurt them. Or, wait, here’s another one, maybe you sabotage your life with recurring patterns and behaviors because subconsciously you don’t believe you deserve happiness, or stability. Oh no, I didn’t mean to upset you, do you want a hug? I can get you a coffee when I come by tomorrow, or send you some money for that red velvet cupcake you love. Let’s have a self-care night we can light candles and use eucalyptus shower steamers and you can cry in my arms and I’ll pet your head and tell you how strong you are. Wait stop yelling at her, let’s take a walk around the neighborhood and tell me why you feel so mad. Ok I hear you, how about next time you feel this way, try to remove yourself from the situation so as to not exacerbate it further. Yes, I understand it’s hard. Oh your dad used to yell at you? I’m so sorry to hear that, tell me about it.

I remember someone told me that to be a good writer it is imperative that you were once a very sad, sad child. I scoffed, but actually I don’t know why I scoffed. This statement was entirely true and relatable. In fact I felt its truth in all the phantom baby teeth still jammed somewhere in my gums.

When you experience a lot of shame in your formative years it becomes significantly more difficult to be perceived by other people in general. The sheer concept of someone watching you do anything, something incredibly mundane, something new, something embarrassing. Cooking dinner or jotting down notes, it makes your skin crawl and your brain turn to static because you can not convince yourself that it is okay to be seen and to be experienced. You can not conceive of the possibility that you are not being intensely judged and are seconds away from being punished. Because to exist is to be ashamed and embarrassed of yourself, whether you are failing at something or not. Because your instinctive reaction to anyone commenting on anything you are doing is to crawl into a gutter and die. A very bizarre and dehumanizing feeling, to not be able to exist without constantly thinking about how you are being perceived. The ceaseless watcher tires not. All that you are turns to rot.

why do living organisms die? is it necessary? or contingent?

The leather footrest smelled of cashews. I am having a candlelit dinner with everyone I’ve ever lost and instead of being overjoyed to see them all I am uncomfortable. They’re telling me it should have been me. They’re probably right.

I was leaving for the rest of the summer. Telling my boss about our road trip. For some reason he assumed we were going to Toronto first, that was not even a stop on our trip. The ten hour drive there is a long one, he laughed, especially when your whole family is in one small car. I smiled, it’s actually 12, and yeah it’ll be a doozy.

Lies, lies, lies. Lies are so interesting. The pathology of lying. Can candor be pathological? I used to think I was relatively stable, I used to see it. Really see it. I could see myself in a put-together outfit, slacks and a cashmere sweater. A wool trench-coat and a silky scarf tossed carelessly, yet flawlessly, around my neck. Boots with small heels that click when I walk, and red circular glasses which men find decidedly “un-sexy” and women fawn over. I could close my eyes and see gently soft blonde ringlets framing my face, I could see the slope of my shoulders and the lines of my legs and when I put all of these respective images together it brought to mind a put-together woman. Until last night.

Last night I was walking and the rain was coming down hard. I believe it is important to note here that this particular rain was forecasted to be snow. That means it was a specific sort of rain. Not simply polluted water falling from the sky and splattering on cobblestones. No, this rain was infused with dead hope, tortured anticipation, intense disappointment. Anyway, there I was, gritting my teeth and bearing down, my inverted umbrella fighting my grip and threatening to fly away entirely. And suddenly I put my right foot in front of my left, as one does when taking a step, and my face began to contort and a sob rose in my throat. Only I did not want to scare my boyfriend, who was walking only a few steps ahead, engaged in a duel with his own umbrella, so I swallowed it down and it tasted like bile and week-old pasta boiled in bong water and microwaved with expired red sauce. It tasted like pure, undiluted fear.

I’ve been experiencing a lot of that recently. Plagued by constant nightmares, waking up from sleepwalking episodes to my own dark reflection staring back at me from the mirror in my bathroom. The walk back to my bed, to the sleeping form of my boyfriend, is most peculiar. Terrifying, in a very comforting way. I am comforted, that he did not wake up, that he did not see that side of me that I do not get to see. I do not think it would be fair at all for him to interact with my somnambulist self, when I can not.

In that moment, on the street, a sob crawling up my throat with razor nails, scratching my vocal cords to shreds, not going quietly into the good night, I saw a different version of myself. The antithesis of the polished, established self I thought myself to be. I saw a very small girl. Here, I do not use small to mean young, or literally petite. I mean small. I mean insignificant, negligible, weak, scared, trembling, trivial, inconsiderable, small. She was kneeling at the edge of a cliff, the unforgiving sea storming far beneath her. She was looking down at it, but her gaze was unseeing, her form unfeeling. I got the sense that this girl was hanging on by a thread. A minuscule thread, borne of a string unraveling into its smaller counterparts, until the remaining strand is thinner than a split end. I was on the street still, fighting with an umbrella which did not care if I lived, died, or melted in this rain stewed with disappointment and despair, yet I was not. I was on the cliff with this girl, she looked just like me but I think I realized then that I did not know what I looked like. Or I did not want to see myself in her. And so she looked like me, yet nothing like anyone I’d ever seen before. Perhaps she is who I look for every night when I sleepwalk to my bathroom and stare at my reflection in the mirror, and every time I turn on the lights I wake up. And she disappears again.

Regardless, I was on the street but not. I was looking at her, this girl, thinking my god when did your hair get so long. I knew her, intimately, biblically, though biblically not in a sexual sense, but rather in the way that the Bible has been around for ages and is purposefully misinterpreted by unsavory folk to justify their wrongdoings and misdeeds and general evil. So yes I knew her Biblically. Her white nightgown plastered to her body, the wind whipping her hair around, her dead eyes. I said her name, as though I was reminding myself. I told her we did have fun did we not? So much fun. Though I could not remember the specifics of this fun, only that it was had. I remembered what I told my sister earlier that day, that there is no cure. There are stable routines, and healthy foods, vitamins and supplements and love and fulfilling enriching activities and time spent with family and friends, affirmations to say to yourself and gym routines to follow and so many things to help. But there is no cure.

My left foot moves in front of my right. Another shaky step. A gust of wind sends the shaft of my umbrella into another fit, the ribs of the outer canopy rattle and creak in a chiming symphony. My boyfriend turns around, as though to make sure I am still walking behind him and not Mary Poppins-ing away on the rooftops somewhere, but something in my gaze makes him stop. Are you ok babe? He asks me, concern softening the corners of his eyes. I blink once. Twice. A girl kneels at the edge of a cliff and stares into the raging sea below and I wonder what she sees. Yup, I smile up at him, just a bit tired.

Sometimes I feel very disconnected from my hands. Even as I type this, it feels as though the hands that fly across the keyboard belong to an adolescent. Stubby fingers and undefined bones moving choppily under skin I can hardly reconcile as my own. These small hands lack the grace and elegance I feel I carry. It feels as though someone has punished their wayward child for sticking grubby fingers into sticky cookie jars and cut them off. It feels as though someone has punished me and stuck those same disproportioned, short-fingered hands where mine used to be. 

There is a room which exists only in my dreams and some nights I chug Ny-Quill and choke down Benadryl in attempts to make it there. Sunday seeps out of me and fatigue sits down at the table and orders herself a tinto de verano. I remember when I was a child I saw a scene on T.V. where someone’s father died. And they did not find his body until the morning after. And the cigarette he had lit smoked itself to the filter after he took his last breath. A pillar of ash in a dead man’s hand. That’s how I feel sometimes. I wrote that in my diary and my brother read it and then texted me off of his Apple Watch asking if I was ok. He said we all feel like that sometimes. I hope to God he was lying. Those feelings should be reserved for horrid people the likes of which I hope he will never meet. Aside from me, of course. And our father.

My sister told me I have a club foot, by which she meant one of my feet always wants to be at the club. Itching to hit the dance floor and drink too much and sway my hips and body in an unseemly rhythm which, if studied, resembles the disembodied jolting of a headless snake. Someone pisses me off, I lose my temper. Don’t piss me off. I lose my temper, I find it again, I keep it better. Is this making any sense? I say again, don’t piss me off. Is catharsis found in revenge, or in control? Delegating people, left, right and center. Yes. I think this is what I was looking for the whole time.

Somebody is playing a piano or a harp. I don’t know which one but they are playing it like they have always played it and also somehow like it is the first day they’ve seen such an instrument. The Spanish Tragedy. I love a good Tragedy. Their first date was when he gets hanged and stabbed a hundred times. Sophocles. A closet drama. My life is a closet drama, better read than acted. Sorry, better read than lived. A revenge tragedy. Revenge is all about pride. I want my order of things to be the order of things. Is that so wrong? My understanding of morality ought to be the enactment of the law. Someone kills herself. Someone gets stabbed. Everyone dies at the end. Everyone always dies at the end. Better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. Rubbish. Such rubbish. Better to have never known never loved and never lost. Ignorance. Bliss.

Cranberry juice. The constant presence of a raging UTI. A looming infection. A torrid affair. Is my only friend this UTI? Is it me and this eternal UTI against the world? I’m sad. I’m happy. My urethra is burning. I’m sad again. I’m sitting on the floor of my shower and pretending I’m a mermaid. It’s not going so well, as I’m sure you can guess. My eyes are dead, my pupils are huge. He says he doesn’t recognize me when I slip into this state. Hold on, let me slip into something more comfortable. Less comfortable. This satin slip of a dress. This silky slip of mental despair. You can only pick one. Take your pick, of one, and you get to have it for a month or so. Or longer. Maybe shorter. Study a brain scan, pick apart the differences. I’m literally Dr. House except minus the Vicodin. God, why do I not have any Vicodin. Maybe if I act like I’m in enough pain my psychiatrist will prescribe me some. Maybe if someone stabs me I’ll be in enough pain that feeling this way will make some type of sense. But I probably shouldn’t mention that last part to my psychiatrist. Only if we are discussing the Spanish Tragedy and it comes up maybe. Good old Dr. [REDACTED]. Always in my corner, except when I need a diagnostic letter to get accommodations for exams and then he says my [REDACTED] is not grounds enough for extra time. Do I have any ground to stand on?

Somebody fell, somebody else fell. One of them was a six year old boy. One of them was a 97 year old woman. Both of them are in the hospital. My great-grandma is fine, thanks for asking. The boy I used to babysit will never be the same again. Funny. But not in a laughing matter sort of way. Funny, in the sense that it is odd. I wish I had Tiresias here with me (the infamous blind seer who foretold Oedipus’ fate, for those of you who are not so caught up on your tragedies). Maybe I too am the criminal I seek. Someone died. Funny how while she was still alive she was some girl I used to smoke with. But today I texted my mom that my friend from high school died. We were in the teal bathroom on the second floor smoking the coil of a dab cart from her neon green dab pen and I set the fire alarm off. She didn’t rat on me. I remember that. We weren’t even friends. I was using her for weed. Why didn’t she rat on me. I checked her Instagram after she died and it said follow back.

© 2025 [No Prompt Necessary]. All rights reserved.

My mother hates when I talk like a Valley Girl. She rolls her eyes and sighs more dramatically than me, she tells me I sound stupid and fake. But it’s like, so totally fun, and girl if it makes me smile shouldn’t I like, so totally do it? But that explanation does not cut it for her. So I told her how Valley speak is, like, basically the new iambic pentameter. Yes mom, Shakespeare who? Milton where? Only instead of the golden 10 syllables per line, alternating stressed and unstressed, and the traditional poetic meter of the good-ole-days, it makes use of rhythmic cadence and patterns of rising intonation (uptalk). Phrases follow predictable patterns so when I say: “Oh my god girl, I like literally can’t…” one might correctly infer the last word to be “even.” That’s prosody, that’s linguistic rhythm, that’s art mom.

We all know the age-old line: Shall I | comPARE | thee to | a SUM-mer’s | DAY? Reading it just doesn’t have the same effect as speaking it in the melodic tone it was written to. I liken this to all the “no duh’s” “as if’s” and “like, totally’s” out there. I bet I can guess how those sounded in your head as you read them, the questioning intonation at the end, the vocal fry of perfection, the exaggerated inflection. Shakespeare, step aside, there’s a new it-girl in town, and she also knows how to create meaning out of delivery. The musicality of Valley speak, the prosodic rhythm, the spoken-word postmodern meter, it all amalgamates into linguistic beauty. Like, actually gag me with a literal spoon. One could even compare it to the epic poetry of yore, where grand narratives of gods and mortals intertwined with fabled wars and intoxicating magic The drama is just as juicy, the quests, trials, and tribulations told with just as much dramatic intensity. If you stress the right syllable, a frappuccino mix-up becomes Circe turning men to swine. And the journey is no less perilous.

Valley speak is preserved through oral story-telling, sound familiar anyone? Homer may have shaped ancient Greek culture, but Valley Girls have defined the cultural values of my time. Irony and parody collapse into each other. Valley speak is like, so totally self-aware and hyper-ironic. It expresses genuine emotion, while mocking itself all the while. Because I, like, so totally care, but not, like, care care, you know? So yeah mom, don’t diss me. I’m a postmodern poet in action, passing on oral tradition and invoking the muse one “like” at a time.

© 2025 [No Prompt Necessary]. All rights reserved.

My coral pink lipstick is pristine but I’m in the bathroom touching it up anyway. Painstakingly outlining my lips in a nude-y brown shade and filling them in with a perfect pink color that pairs stunningly with my bright blue eyes. After a few layers of pink, enough so that my lips feel dryer than the air in this musty bathroom, I carefully apply my Lusciously-Lovely sparkly gloss. One layer, another layer. It’s, like, mesmerizing almost, watching the fluffy wand apply the buttery gloss to my full lips. It’s therapeutic, religious, spiritual. All else fades away and it is just me observing me, brushing the applicator back and forth in decisive, smooth strokes coating my lips in layers of sparkly shine. In the other room someone gasps, she either forgot to shave her armpits or take her birth control. I frown at my reflection, I wish I had a hairbrush, or some more mascara. My eyeshadow palette could have fit in my tiny purse, if only I had foregone my phone tonight. My lashes are drooping and my hands itch to brush my hair with my long-handled brush. To calm errant curls and sooth the wayward wisps of hair framing my face. At this stage of the party my hair resembles a host of yellow snakes stuck onto someone’s head. A teeming, writhing mass of pale, golden bodies. Wild. 

I use the side of my finger to press my eyelashes to my eyelid, pseudo-curling them by holding them in this place for several minutes. I look around the dingy bathroom, my lukewarm hard seltzer sits menacingly on the toilet lid, daring me to take a drink. I like to play this game where I wait between drinks until it is almost unbearable, sobriety I mean, and then I take a sip. I study my reflection, wary blue eyes assessing sweaty curls plastered to my forehead. Immaculate black eyeliner frames my eyes, ending in sharp wings which elongate a rather unsettling stare. Some remnants of glittery eyeshadow remain, dusting my eyes in multicolored galaxies. The highlighter I meticulously applied to the high points of my face- cheekbones, tip of nose, eyebrow bones, and Cupid’s Bow, has melted into sweat, and oil and something a little bit sad. A tight black corset squeezes my waist and pushes up my cleavage garishly. My tight black pants are molded to my ass and thighs, sky-high heels lengthening my legs. I stare into my eyes until the pounding bass and vibrating floors dwindle away entirely and I am somewhere else. Far, far from here. I am a child again, I know nothing of makeup, of dressing slutty. Am I living a bad dream? When the world is quiet enough, when the gaudy yellow light hits the ceiling just right, I think I am. I wish I could find the spot where time is weakest, touch it, tear it to shreds, and wake up on the couch behind my parents where I crawled because I had a nightmare. It’s summer, see? The door is open and the lights are off. See? There’s a mosquito buzzing around. You’re fine, see? I am scared, to cast out my demons and lose all the best parts of myself. There is banging at the door, a gaggle of drunk girls fall over each other and I barely snatch my drink in time as one of them throws open the toilet lid and another one starts violently puking.

“Ohmygod you’re so druuunk, I can’t believe it,” a girl slurs. 

The one vomiting pauses to look up and ask “Can someone pass me the coke? I really need a line.”

I take a sip of my drink and leave them to their deliberations. 

Rejoining the party goes like this: Raucous laughter, penetrating music, people jumping up and down on the carpet floor of someone’s parents’ basement. Nothing can touch us here, where vivid colors dance amongst shadows and a light sheen covers this brackish wreck. We talk and sing and everything is beautiful. I am certain reality stands still here; time too. Here at our incidental gathering in the dark, dusty outskirts of this town, this lacking, torturous caul, where any and all joy goes to die and the only moments of reprieve are to be found here. So nowhere, really. The music ebbs and flows, slurs and jolts and the thumping songs melt sleepily, almost dreamily into one another. In this surge of bleary eyes and hungry souls, it seems I will be happy forever. A peculiar feeling, happiness, when I can’t feel the wind blowing through me, when I am not simply enduring. I think I won’t ever not be happy again. 

Even now, it is as though someone has ripped off the pristine tablecloth and revealed the rotting, maggot infested table that lurked beneath. As though someone messily spilled juice on the couch but waited too long to clean it off, and the stain is still visible underneath. There is a smell of sweet rot, of dangerous inhibitions. The atmosphere hangs low here, a cloudy cloth, ill met by dim lights, ill fitting in all the wrong spots. A party of ghosts, a swarm of awkward bodies coated in a sickly false smelling air of sophistication, indistinguishable corpses.

Something grabs my attention, out back. Past the various people playing pong and doing keg stands. Past even the stoners and druggies shooting up snorting sniffing huffing smoking puffing. Past the couples who snuck away to hide behind the line of trees in the backyard. A light, beckoning. Perhaps it would be my reckoning. I giggle at my rhyme, wow I must be more fucked up than I thought. I giggle again. 

I follow the light through trees and now I am far into the woods, the sounds of the party left in the silky summer air behind me. All of a sudden I am in a clearing and there is a being in front of me. I use the word “being” here to signify that this thing definitely was, although what it was exactly eluded me. Egregiously long, pale, spindly arms wrapped around me, resting lightly on my exposed shoulders and reaching around to my collarbones. For some reason I didn’t even feel the need to flee, perhaps some calming pheromone emanating from this other-worldly being. It had no face, no features I recognized. In fact if this explanation seems entirely underwhelming it is because I had no idea what I was looking at. I had read once, that when we finally made contact with aliens they would be like nothing we could ever imagine. All their “ships” and “gadgets” would be made of materials and substances we had never seen, could not even begin to conjure in the dark, deep recesses of our minds. And that is what was standing in front of me. Embracing me. I felt a sharp prick at the base of my neck, and then, voices. Thousands of voices, I could hear every branch I was standing on wailing, and every tree and every leaf and every animal and everything was shrieking. The noise was overwhelming, unbearable, the cacophony of life, screaming punishingly into my mind. No, not a cacophony I realized, but a Symphony. Orchestrated to sinister perfection. I fall to my knees, clutching my ears in agony, and then it is over.

Hello, do not be afraid.

What the fuck.

We have an offer for you. We have studied you, seen how you long and you yearn. Seen how you want more than what this world has to offer. And we are here to offer that to you.

Oh…ok? So, then, this is like a conversion thing? Or what? 

Not quite. Come with us tonight, see nothing of your old life again, but we promise- you will know true happiness. True enlightenment. You will know things your human brethren have never known, see things you have been dreaming of your whole life.

We can grant you power the likes of which you’d never seen, make it so you never submit to another again.

I took a second to consider, though in truth I did not need one. I already knew what I wanted. I already knew I was destined for more than this world had to offer. It had always felt too one-dimensional to me, too boring. And what these creatures were offering me did not seem boring. No, it seemed to be the greatest adventure I’d ever have. I did not question their words, I did not have to. I felt a sense of peace and truth to their offer, as though somewhere inside me, some part of me knew what they said to be true. I had never experienced such steadfast trust in someone, my answer was clear.

Yes, I will come.

And so it will begin again.

I wake up in my bed, lazy sun filtering in through my window and curling up on my sheets. I sit up abruptly, looking around for the creatures from last night, for any sign of my new adventure. I find only last night’s coffee in my chipped, red mug, grounds peeking through the sorry brown liquid at the bottom. And my room, a mess from ransacking it for last night’s outfit. Everything is normal, not a thing out of place. Aside from me. In these moments, I breathe until the fear dissipates. 

© 2025 [No Prompt Necessary]. All rights reserved.

I was disappearing. 

But this time it was happening at a faster rate

wind whistling through rotted bones

The remnants of my skin hanging loosely like paper chains from my body 

The whispering tree

the rustling of my skin sounds like a whispering tree. 

I hope my death feels like the morning after a sleepover. 

Crusted eyes and bleary faces, begging my mom to stay for just one more hour. 

Knowing the answer already. 

Behind her the car purrs and your siblings bicker from the back seat. 

Next time honey, she says. 

You turn around and run to your best friend, grabbing her lithe frame and tugging it towards you. Thank you for having me,

Thank you for coming. 

My mom reaches her hand out for me to take it. 

© 2025 [No Prompt Necessary]. All rights reserved.

That’s my fucking shirt you bitch I hate you thats why he left you thats why all your friends hate you and I cant believe you’d be such a sniveling snake and go behind my back and take it from my closet and

He said what to you? Send me his number I’ll pretend to be a lawyer and serve him digital papers and while you’re at it send me his address I know someone from Lynn who would be happy to take care of it for you and I told all my friends and posted it on my account everyone is reporting his account and spamming him at this rate we are gonna be the ones getting reported for hate speech and I messaged his mom on Facebook and told her what he said and

Did you hear what mom said about my room As If she understands what im going through im so stressed and she doesnt get it oh my god I know right remember when she told us to eat that nasty oatmeal with sugar free jam and we dumped it all down the sink drain and it clogged everything and we never told her and 

I was playing that piano piece that we said would be our funeral barge and February 23 has come and gone 21 times now and we are still going strong and obviously if you needed like a lung I would give it to you no questions asked but if you want my lip liner you’ll have to wait for the next blue moon what You already used it Great thanks a lot now I have to throw it away and burn the bin yes im actually going to throw it away there it goes and no dont you dare fish it out it’s not yours now it’s my trash You insipid little rat get back here this is why no one loves you and why Mr. Fabian gave you a B that one time and

I miss living with you in one house and waking up to play our lego house and peeling the tinfoil off of Lindt chocolate wrappers and dressing up our dolls in them jeez we were so thrifty and nifty even though I hated living with you in one apartment two huge souls crammed into a one bedroom never works out well no never works out well but a big house would do yeah I think that would do two huge souls and one grand villa on the lake with a stream and a river running by and a deep forest and berries aplenty and a beach down that path that we walk with our horses and a huge shower with built in speakers for you yeah yeah I cant see myself living without you and

Ugh stop talking to me cant you see im reading Stop coming into my room and yammering about pilates and finance and all the connections you’ve made because This book is getting so good and you’re distracting me and 

Wait actually you really remind me of this one character she’s so strong and beautiful and everyone is obsessed with her and wait actually she reminds me so much of you and

How do you always help me with math like seriously whats up with that how are you so good at math all the axes and the functions the sets and the foils and when letters replace numbers you’d think id be good at that but thoughts are like pennies and we are like beggars waiting to be rich or no thoughts are like wishes and we are beggars who are rich and

If you know this is a public space and im watching my show why on earth would you come play piano right next to me really And during the good part like wow you really are just out to get me huh you just hate me and want me to die huh and

Um is she seriously wearing that Dots and stripes oh my god she looks like a poisonous jungle jeez everyone needs someone in their life to tell them the truth even when its brutal and harsh and

Im so lucky to have you even when we’re just atoms of dust floating through some void that’s probably a black hole but we are too proper to call it that never call a spade a spade or a black hole a black hole it’s just not done no it’s just not done but im still gonna turn and ask you if you remember that time we rolled down the stairs holding onto each other like we were kolobok and then we’ll laugh and laugh and then oh my god are those my shoes? 

© 2025 [No Prompt Necessary]. All rights reserved.