Disco Diaries is a free publication of micro-essays and vignettes. If you enjoy it, consider supporting it financially. You can send a few dollars straight to my Venmo (@katyabaro). No wiggle room in the budget? No problem. Sharing this newsletter with friends who may enjoy it shows immense support, too.
Nobody misses you when you’re gone. You fall to the bottom of bags and chests, but your return is always a delight.
Sky blue and white marbled with a sheen, you look so smooth but somehow you collect things with a soft stickiness. Small things — a hair, some dirt, old pencil shavings. We rinse you with reverence under a stream of faucet water, and wipe you dry on denim pants.
My god, your shine! There should be a rush of flavors, yet the lick feels empty and the smell — sharp like hard pollen — dismisses all cravings. Still I need to nibble you to perfection, to bite away the seam which divides what should be whole.
One bite pulls away the smallest fragment of your Saturnian center. Outside there is greater potential for change.
This will be the last time your cloudy surface meets the sidewalk. I push you into the very thing you’re meant to push away, sanding your uneven circumference on the rocky pavement. I am a sculptor and you are my clay, but my young touch isn’t dainty enough and I feel you give.
Your smooth exterior is now shattered, cut open by the bumps, left scattered in repulsive clumps of gnarled insides never meant to be seen.
I don’t know how to love what I have broken. I don’t remember what you were like when you were almost perfect. You’ll be gone again for good, now, living as garbage, your blue sky shine almost forgotten.
I'm deeply disturbed to realize I didn't understand this one at all.