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What is the word?

Wrote this out as I drove to my spoken word event this evening... What is the word for "that’ll do?"

Natalie LaFrance Slack
4 min readDec 15, 2019

It’s Thursday and
I’m supposed to have something written
And I’m supposed to be ready to share
But instead of writing
I’ve been running my fingers across the raised lymph nodes on my neck
Googling my blood work
Looking for answers in hemoglobin
And putting my hope in the Hippocratic oath
Wondering if the numbers will work themselves out
The way I hope my fingers will work
The lymph nodes back under the skin

The problem is that
The stuff that gets under our skin
Is the stuff we become known for

I'm exhausted
What I want to do is sleep forever
What I want to do is rip the pages from the books
Rip the words from the pages
Paste them up like shiplap around my bow
And let them weather storms for me

I want to sleep forever
And I want to close my eyes
And
I want to remember what it felt like to lie naked and face up in my cradle and
Make pictures out of clouds
Before the shapes had names
Before my voice had words…

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