Alice Marie

ADHD Cat

My brain is a jungle and I am constantly getting lost. Last night I saw an ad on Instagram. “Write a story for twenty grande,” I remember in college, writing all of my papers last minute in that tiny computer lab in the basement of the Art building. They just flowed out of me, little essays and thoughts about art and life… and maybe two sentences on the topic. I’m all average. I’m the middle child of two middle children. My grades were Cs my boobs are Bs. My foundation is called “medium beige.” What’s in the middle of beige? Hell could be a beige bubble. Wait, no, that’s not where I was going. That’s the ADHD going off the trail and into the jungle again. “Come back this way,” I say to an imaginary ADHD cat. As if I believe I can tell a cat what to do. So I clicked on the link asking for a dystopian entry, I read through the rules and clicked around on the site. I should also note that I’m also dyslexic. And despite reading and clicking around the site 4 times before bed. The dyslexia did the dyslexia and flipped some bits around as I drifted off to sleep. And when I woke up the rules I misremembered said something about accepting a 100-word poem instead of a 600-word story. I laid in bed, stoked, as fragments of a short poem mixed with a dream started to swirl together. I can totally write a poem and try to win twenty grande! There is definitely a very cool poem inside of me today. What else am I doing today!? “NOTHING ANYMORE!” pounced the ADHD cat. And we took a left turn away from a to-do list to write a poem about a Star whose home exploded, a heart-shaped locket and the universe. After writing and polishing and completing my poem, only then did I read the rules and finally understand. Damn you dyslexia! Here we are again with something kind of cool, and it doesnt quite doesn't fit in. Dyslexia is like a great chef who sometimes mixes up salt and sugar. Don't even get me started on the concept of left and right. So like college, I had to add some extra lines to explain the other lines. To summarize, I wrote a poem for a contest and being dyslexic the rules and concept bits flipped around. But, I don’t know all the rules for dystopia, is it un-dystopia to call out a dystopia? Does dystopia have to be big or can it be small and inside just a single person's head? Like Men in Black, and those tiny alien lockers. How do you un-dystopia a dystopia? Because you cant un-dyslexic a dyslexic. And what is fiction versus nonfiction? Doesn’t the best lie involve bits of truth? The cat chimes in, “Also, can moons have moons?” I pause and lift my head, amused. "Im not sure," I reply, "but that would be cool!" We sit here and stare down this dystopian hole of questions that has appeared before us in the jungle. Yikes, do we want to dive down and answer that? "Nah." we shrug together, and we both turn back. "Besides, we already wrote that cool poem, let’s make a snack."