Dear Diary

I walked until I met myself
coming the other way.
We/I fought.
It was a tie.
I knew all my moves

Dear Diary,

I had a chicken liver, onion, lettuce, and tomato on samoon (Iraqi flat bread). It was delicious

Later on, and unrelated to the lunch, I saw a young woman dressed in an all white Little Bo Peep type outfit (sans bonnet and staff).Short sleeved blouse, short skirt, long socks up to her knees. At first glance, it looked as though she cuts all over arms and legs. Straight line cuts.

Many years (decades) ago, I was part of an online poetry critique group. I wrote about cutting. One of my critiquers was a psychiatric nurse who liked my poem, and he told me that most cutters cut “criss cross” patterns into (onto?) themselves.

On closer inspection (from a discrete distance), I saw that the young woman’s cuts looked blistered and raised, which I have learned are called keloids.

I had to stop looking because it could (perhaps rightly) be interpreted as being creepy, and I didn’t want to upset the young woman. I was in equal measure fascinated and repulsed by the juxtaposition of the Little Bo Peepish outfit and horrific scars, it was their number that made them horrific.

I really wanted to ask her if she was a self-harmer. She had a plan face and an athletic body.
Aside from the outfit and scars she looked like a “normal” “average person” except she seemed a little more serene and tranquil than most.

Later on, as I was swimming laps at Cabravale Leisure Centre, I looked outside and saw a colony of cockatoos frolicking about on the small grassy hill out the front of the centre.

When I got home. I mopped my kitchen floor which is black and my lounge room floor which is white and it struck me that if I ever wrote about these floors in a work of fiction, readers would imbue (is that the right word?) with all sorts of symbolic intent and significance having to do with morality, truth, race, opposition, and all manners of dichotomous discursive epistemolgies. But in the realms of factual reporting they are just what they are.
Or are they?

I listened to.the Comedy Bang Bang podcast as I wrote poems and drew pictures and then I slept and had one of my reoccurring dreams where I pretended to be working in the upper floor in a skyscraper