I'm Adali Mone and this is The Slowdown.

I think a lot about how numb so many of us can be, living in our own personal realities,

trying to cope with the chaos and trauma of our times.

There's a distance that we are cultivating, a way of seeing the world through a gauzy

hay so that everything doesn't hurt so much.

I feel myself doing this often, putting the veil up, looking at the world through my fingers,

waiting for what could possibly go wrong next.

There are times where I feel like I'm creating a character out of myself, a character that

someone stronger than I am or less full of emotions.

Sometimes I just like to be the person that people often assume I am, a little more

resilient, a little more polished, a little less likely to break apart into their real

human mass that I am.

Today's poem examines what it is to feel like a character in your own life.

I love how this poem uses a film character to enter into the otherness many of us feel

in our daily lives.

In the end, we are Human Like, Blade Runner, 2049, by Nina Minya Polz, one.

I am what they call your cloud girl of the city of your dreams, invisible music box girl,

no one sees.

We play dress up in the dark, unhungering, untouchingly, I smile the right way with my mouth.

I dance the right way with the spinning light fields of my hips, undreaming things you

ask me to erase.

You see blue eyes and unpinned hair, but while you sleep, I am pure blue light, nuclear,

...