Kiana

My cousins, Prince and Charles, are here for a visit. The news that they were coming was enough to make me shiver with anxiety for days. What am I gonna do? I want to make their stay worthwhile, pleasant, and enjoyable, but I am just a confused and anxiety-stricken person on her way to destruction. What am I gonna do?

It’s wild how my mind overtakes me. So far, I’ve made their stay fun. We roamed the city together, all the while carrying out little errands from elders. I recounted to them a story involving a cat, a snake, a dog, a bird, and a princess; I even earned my Cool Cousin badge by showing them how to pennyboard their way through the streets! Charles now has a new green Penny Board, which makes my old pink one (lent to me by Claire) look like a vintage item, shoe grease and all. In our cooldown times I made them watch Wes Anderson movies, plus the Batman series directed by Christopher Nolan. Uh-oh, my agenda to turn them Super Nerdz is showing up! WELP.

This family fun is all in conjunction with my grandmother’s 70th birthday, which is underway. Everyone’s busy, clamoring about with all the preparations. I, on the one hand, have proven myself a person of little to no use at all. With June coming up, which means enrollment time, and the dreaded back-to-school, I am filled to the brim (overflowing, even) with anxiety and fear, which shows up as lethargy and, in my relatives’ eyes, sloth.

As for my love-hate relationship with my body and my mind, I’m taking measures that I know will quiet the voices negging me out. These include asking a friend from high school to jog with me.; forgetting to write my to-do lists but not castigating myself for it; remembering to write my to-do lists and rewarding myself for it; buying Amy Rose Spiegel’s new book, Action, directly on its release date! Lastly, lighting candles (red, purple, white, green), reading books and making some shameful margin annotations. ♦