Scrub
On jays, garden parties, hard doctor phone calls, and writing from other genders.
She wrote “Life is worth living” one-hundred times in her notebook until the sentiment began feeling somewhat genuine, when in fact: the number of sentences she had written only amounted to seventy-six, but she figured no one would question her estimations when the reality was she’d filled an entire page. Good enough.
“Life is worth living!” the jays squawked out from their phone-cord perches above the garden lights in the backyard in the boring neighborhood where people squinted at you when they said “Hello.” Humans laughed on the ground. A guest had mentioned something about feeding crows.
Who cares about crows? she wanted to say. Her dream pet was a blue jay. Something small and cunning like herself, or at least what she imagined herself to be. Truth be told it wasn’t even a blue jay. Stellar. Although one had to put the ‘s at the end unless they wanted a Twitter stranger to correct them on the public forum. She still shivered at the memory of that. The shame. “*Steller’s. Not ‘Steller.’ You must be mistaken.” But the jays that twittered down didn’t care about things like names and titles. They were not stellar anyway, but scrub, and they were not screeching: “Life is worth living” but rather: “Get away from my nest goddamn you.”
More guests stood from the lawn—circles in the grass like deer.
“One more picture, one more!” she shouted, and a brilliant flash as the Fujifilm blinded her companions and spat something out she would scan later.
“Life is worth living.”
“I am loved.”
“Look at the proof I have!”
But the aches later in the evening, the shakes and panics and Oh how I wish I could cry thoughts made her question that little sentence she’d written seventy-six instances. She doodled in that very notebook the next day, a string of uh huh and mhmm’s coming from her mouth as another voice sighed and grew audibly frustrated over the phone. More shame.
“You’re not trusting the process,” was the main gist of these conversations. But how could she trust in machines? Things that ran out of battery and crashed on the reg and never seemed to play Spotify when she needed it most. She hated the things, and yet installed ChatGPT onto her phone that morning anyway.
“What is the best software to identify duplicate photos from their metadata?”
“I’m sorry, but as a language learning model I am unable to...”
Perhaps, in her uploaded form, she could be free of her body. Her gender. Her conceptions. Her lack of a jay bird.
“Life is worth uploading.”
She did what the phone-voice said and somehow grew more sour when the process actually worked. She worried this day would ruin the previous one’s memory. That all she’d done was soiled what made life worth living (uploading) by making mistakes like the phone-voice had told her.
“Trying to self-correct the issue only exacerbated the problem, when in fact you should have…” Exhaustion was all she had left, as well as the photos.
Oh but the thing was… the thing was…
Numbers coasted the following days. “Sugar surfing” was the unofficial term. She still had that book somewhere, under the couch. Never to see the light of day again, if she could help it. 77% in range. And not anxious. Was this all it took? The realization made her cross.
So she was angry. But she remembered the days before. The sparkling waters and soft shitty jazz floating about the air. Guests smiling and making awkward small talk which soon melted into actual conversation once the wine took hold. She passed the camera around the table, and people took selfies and candid shots, and for one stupid moment she thought she might scrapbook it all into something sweet. It was sweet though. Everyone was so lovely.
“Life is worth living.” But in a way, it actually was. Is. In seventy-six instances.
Scrub jays sing out overhead, feeding their children in the nearby bush.