egret

I am a woman in my twenties, and for me writing in public is a fight against being cautious, anxious, risk-averse like a bird that eats tiny fish and stalks away from quiet visitors trying to learn from it.

I live in a place where I can see a bird preserve from my apartment, and egrets are the best of them all, with creepily long necks and sharp beaks for spearing incautious fish. They stand perfectly still on a river bank for ages, observing.

I work from home, so I look out my windows a lot between pouring buckets of effort into helping maintain a tiny software empire. I've been warned since I was a teenager that software kills you slowly, but I wanted to be part of it anyway. To retain shreds of life, I learned from other software people to embed myself in physical places, learning about the histories of buildings and where the local water is piped from, facts and systems and groundings in reality.

I am a woman in my twenties, and for me writing in public is a fight against being cautious, anxious, risk-averse like a bird that eats tiny fish and stalks away from quiet visitors trying to learn from it.