reading room
To-Be List
They ask, What do you do? as if humanity needs a stapled receipt, as if being requires proof of purchase.
My brain is a house of lamps. Some days one bulb floods the place— hyperfocus clicks on and the rest forget their names. Other days the lamps hum at different pitches, and I stand palms-up, listening for the blend.
The world clicks a clipboard open—boxes half-ticked for me. Make eye contact. Shake hands the correct number of seconds. Reply within an hour. Translate feeling into small talk, then into smaller talk. Tick the boxes. Tick. Now I'm the clock.
But time isn't a corridor; it's a tidal flat with sudden hollows, and I cross it anyway, love in both hands.
Doing looks good in photographs. Being is tapping a rhythm on the bus seat, sunglasses in the supermarket, counting exits, letting the kettle boil twice— because a thought held me. When I roll a ring, it's prayer with moving parts.
And they still ask, What do you do?
Here is my To-Be List:
[] Be kind to the kid under fluorescent buzz. [] Be a friend to the focus when it chooses me. [] Be honest when my smile is tired. [] Be breath before answer. [] Be the pause between questions, not the apology after it. [] Be music without lyrics when words get tangled. [] Be here. Not “behind”.
I have been things too— essays, shifts, favours, perfect rows of dishes. But I have been things too: a harbour for a friend's quiet, a storm of ideas no one else saw coming, a mapmaker of details, a body that remembers joy like a drum remembers hands.
Some call it masking; I call it wearing a rented face.
What do I do? I notice. I care in ways that don't fit a spreadsheet. I build cathedrals of attention, every lamp a lit window— and then I rest, which looks like nothing until you've tried living without it.
Today I will be the task. I will check myself off gently—no pen squeak, no red mark— just breath in the margins and a small, certain note: Human. Being.
— Lilith