When your name is all you have left, what do you do?

Photo by Vikram Aditya on Unsplash

Poverty.

It is a word I can swallow with fire.

Something which sticks like a second darkness to my body.

I never thought I would be here looking at a fridge that’s full and bills in the late stages. But life does throw curveballs, and mine was a pink slip and a medical debt mountain.

Was I somebody you know?

I had a life, a job, a career.

Now? And now I am just another statistic, another warning. The famine painter, only this thirst is not love.

So I sit here at my desk, and look at the blinking cursor. Mocking me, taunting me. There used to be words, so many words. They’re in jail, shut behind a screen of despair and hopelessness.

But I still go for it, keep stooping. Because why not? So that is what I am left with, this indigestible ability, these weak skills.

I post pitches, queries, pleas. I go through job boards and classifieds, for scraps, for crumbs. Everything just to keep the lights on, to keep the wolves out.

And I wonder, sometimes, in my lowest mo…