'Slow Down, You Crazy Child', by Tanisha Singh
My mother was always good at sweeping.
She dusted my childhood into neat little piles,
swept my hunger into the kitchen sink,
wrung my cries into warm, folded bedsheets.
She even swept me—
gathered my limbs, my spine, my skin,
tucked me into a cocoon of good manners and quiet compliance,
pressed me into the tight corners of a wooden chest
where good children are meant to fit.
But one fine morning, I woke up—
not as a girl, not as a dreamer, not even as a human—
but as something worse.
Something tragic.
Something small, skittering, and easily crushed.
I tried molting out of my grotesque form,
peeled my skin, peeled my name, peeled my past,
but responsibility stuck to me like a second spine.
My mother clicked her tongue, unimpressed.
"You’ll get used to it," she said.
"Everyone does."
So now I scuttle to work in my iron-pressed exoskeleton,
carry dead dreams on my back like molted shells.
I sit in meetings where people mistake boredom for productivity,
where we talk about deliverables
while our bodies decompose under fluorescent lights.
No one asks why our voices sound like unpaid overtime.
No one asks why our hands shake like they’re late on rent.
They never told us adulthood was a pyramid scheme.
"Follow your dreams," they said,
but dreams come with loans, utility bills, and the occasional existential crisis.
Dreams rot under the weight of calendars and tax forms.
Dreams turn into ghosts, haunting the last free spaces in our heads.
At some point, I stopped looking in mirrors.
The last time I did, my reflection twitched, glitched, distorted.
A bug? A body? A burden?
My legs were too many and my will was too little.
My antennae quivered at the sound of a pay cut.
I wonder if I should just stay still, let the world exterminate me.
Would it be called murder?
Or just another Tuesday?
But then—
somewhere in the echoes of my mother’s sweeping,
in the rustle of papers, the tap-tap-tap of keyboards,
I hear it:
"Slow down, you crazy child."
And for the first time, I listen.
I stop crawling.
I stop running.
I stop—
and breathe.
Even cockroaches deserve a break.
Even cockroaches tell their stories.
Even cockroaches survive.