“I am busy.” The words tumbled out without hesitation. Her life was wrapped in those three words. “I am busy.”
It rescued her, from pretending to care about matters that she couldn’t care less about. But the weight of the pretense of being busy burdened her slowly. Unable to pinpoint what exactly kept her occupied, she found herself trapped in a cycle she couldn’t escape.
Stuck in the relentless grip of busyness, she longed for the freedom she once knew, to just say her mind without the shield of busyness.
Photo by Antoni Shkraba on Pexels.com
This piece is written in response to the one hundred and eighty seventh edition of Fiction Monday inspired by the word prompt – BUSY and the below picture prompt hosted by yours truly. Do join in if you have a tale to tell.
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Void Thoughts 
This is me. It’s just easier to say I’m busy rather than tell someone ‘I’d rather do nothing than spend time at your event’. I wish it were more socially acceptable to say you don’t want to do something or go somewhere.
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So very true for so many of us. But for the last few years, and especially, this one, I’m trying not to use ‘busy’ as an excuse for living!
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I can relate so much to this – in a few lines you have captured our realities. We are so busy, busy with what we do not know, but busy enough to not know what to do either!
however, it is true that it is a very convenient answer for getting out of things 🙂
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It is a convenient answer. But I think we give away our true power by hiding behind those words. Having said that, I have done this in the past, might do it again in the future because of the convenience those three words provides and the easiness of rejecting something without thinking about hurting someone else’s feelings.
Glad to see you stop by, Ishieta.
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All too relatable.
And this is almost a “prose poem” I think. The topic of what is/is not a “prose poem” has come up several times in the past two weeks, and I think this comes very close.
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I don’t know why you are anonymized again, Holly.
I was in two minds whether this piece is a prose poem or simply prose. I tend to think the random pieces of musings that I jot down are often a prose poem. The pieces with no beginning or end, yet make sense in a written format.
I don’t know what prompted you to comment on whether this is a prose poem or not, Holly, but when I was publishing this post the same thought went through my mind. Unable to decide, I simply called it a piece. 🙂
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This should be relatable to many people taking the easy way out to decline engagements they don’t want to become a part of by mentioning their busyness. It is sad when one cannot clearly speak up their mind resorting to making excuses.
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Yes, often the statement ‘I am busy’ rescues us from taking on new commitments that we are not interested in. But we should be able to say ‘I don’t want to’ if that’s the case. Like Phoebe says in Friends when she is asked to help setting up Ross’s apartment, “I wish I could, but I really don’t want to!” 😄
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