I ate too many Cookies

I ate too many Christmas cookies at the cottonwood open mic night and now I have a stomach ache.

Dear Cookies,

Haven’t we all been there? Some of us live there—that space between want and regret. Everything is a push pull along the thinnest wire of life and death. This is why everything that seems small reverberates with such loud, monstrous echoes, because under all of it is a pulsing mortality that beats with each resonating heart beat.

So even cookies and even stomach aches and even love and even grief—they all remind us we are so frail and human and we are frail and human because one day we will die and we also have to say goodbye to people we can’t live without and it’s a hellscape of unimaginable proportions.

But at least there are cookies here and there.

Ah, but see the circle we find ourselves in?

Sad at our impending doom we eat too many cookies and then we pull up and out of the despair only to find more cookies and more death and the cycle repeats and its so hard to be so kind to ourselves in the whirlwind.

Everything has a cost.

And we aren’t made of money.

But hey, at least there are cookies and places like a community open mic where we can come together, sit in a room, eat too much sugar, and re-wallpaper the walls of existence and what it can mean to suffer and to love, all together, all the stomach aches in tow.

—with love for what you consume that brings your agony,

The Complaint Department