A.E. Janes

Outside my doorstep there are two barn swallow nests. They are the size of two of my fists. I thought the birds were invasive, the way they dive down whenever I open my door; the way their nests are shaped signal a type of bird that's seen enough to know they are wanted dead (not alive); the way the bird has multiplied from two to fourteen over the course of June and now July. 

They are nuisance swallows and I wish they'd poke the eyes of my evil neighbor out rather than chase after me like I'm a wasp perfect for feeding to the babies in their nest. I have been out of ideas lately to be honest, with the only thing on my mind being the barn swallows and my body. They (the birds) have red faces with deep black wings. Their nests look like they are made of spit and twigs and feces. They rest on top of fire sprinklers which I think is a serious hazard to already mundane and annoying apartment living. My apartment, on the inside, is protected from the swallows but my thoughts and doings inside the apartment are not. The alarm I use every morning mimics their cry, a mistake I realize now, and the orange glow with chirping noises I have used to wake me up for the last ten months now annoys me as much as my smartphone did before making my big swap to a dumb phone.

I have tried to expose myself to situations that require my brain to make less boring observations so I can try and come up with some kind of poetic writing from those things I see. I can tell you about the Fourth of July or walking around my boyfriend's apartment's parking lot last Monday. I can tell you not what I saw, but what people said. My boyfriend who took me to see fireworks told me that I should try and remember it. A woman I walked by twice in the parking lot whispered to her husband, "She's walked by already...", which made me feel like I'd done something very wrong by pacing the length of the lot a couple dozen times while my boyfriend slept off his work-induced-misery and while I tried to walk off my brain zaps (I'll explain in a little bit).

I find myself right now very bored at the thoughts in my head which is throbbing from having to take Macrobid (an antibiotic among many different antibiotics which contains a slew of side effects that make me wish just once someone would walk through my front door, wrap me in a blanket, and cook something warm for me to eat a few times a day—a thought that makes me cry so I try to not think about it). I sleep late to eat up a few extra hours and take my time when walking from wall to wall in my small one bed one bath apartment where I hear swallows chirping outside every door and window I loan from a complex run by an oversized woman with a nasty man-like mug who hates her autistic son. 

For the past week I have spent very little time in my apartment because of the swallows and boring thoughts and missing of people and because I am hopeful something exciting will happen if I am just never home. I do miss being home when I am away though. Recently I spent a few hundred more dollars on home improvement items and once again, wondered to myself as I looked at my handiwork, why it took me so long to buy things that make me happier. I imagine in the winter when everything is frozen over and the swallows are hopefully dead for some months my apartment will be cozy on the inside because of the new additions to the space. 

At the moment, though, I am quite plain. My body has too many cuts and bruises (literally) for my taste and the inside of my brain sometimes zaps when I get particularly nervous. I dislike that all my friends recently have confirmed the presence of my nervousness and how distasteful it can be to the untrained passerby. The weird sensation on the inside of my head, which makes my skull feel very hollow and more useless than the rest of my body, is hard to explain but is the cause of my aggravation almost all the time lately. My days of having too much freedom are ending which I am glad about, although I am sad I never went out often enough with more people I like in the middle of the night to find the excitement I crave. In about three months I will have finished a semester of graduate school, I will be teaching classes again at the local high school I live too close to, and I will have celebrated a 21st birthday with someone I will worry about perpetually until one day I get sick of the worry. I hope my hair will be a little longer by the end of those few months. Oh, and, I will have planned out my next steps for the spring, including what to do about the nuisance swallows outside my apartment's orifices.