🔥 Nothing kills whimsy like “reality.”

🎧 Listen to me read it — just the way I meant it.

💬 Prefer to read? Here’s the original text.

Mercedes is smoking a cigarette, dangling it from her fingertips like an afterthought. Her sunglasses are on, and the harsh noon sun glares off the lenses.

I bet the lenses are glass. That she bought them for herself, a gift for closing a big deal. But I guess I wouldn’t know. She keeps these things to herself.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” I say. I mean to make it slide out nonchalantly, but the way it tumbles reeks of indignance. “How long’s this been going on?” I draw a cloud in the air with my hands to illustrate.

She rolls her eyes. I think. I can’t really see them. “It’s been ages,” she says. “Before we met. You really haven’t noticed?”

“You’re gaslighting me,” I say. I’ve known Mercedes to smoke plenty of weed, but never a cigarette. Maybe from one of those long-stemmed holders, while she’s working an audience in thigh-highs and a garter belt. But not outside her law office at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday.

She doesn’t say anything for a minute. Just takes another drag, lifts her chin, and blows a steady, purposeful stream of smoke at the sun.

“I haven’t done it much since — Bryan,” she says. “He doesn’t like it.” The statement snaps. But there’s a twinge of something behind it. 

Her posture is tense.

I sit my phone down on my knee and turn my body toward her. Try to exude warmth. “I don’t, either,” I say. Gently.

But she’s not in the mood, apparently, to indulge in self-awareness or relational preservation.

Mercedes doesn’t look at me. She just stays really still, for a good thirty seconds. Then she drops the half-done cigarette on the ground, crushes it under the pointed toe of her shoe, grabs her bag and walks off. 

Then she gives me the finger.

***

Yeah, I said I was done with fiction for a while. But this isn’t fiction. It’s parts work.

Really, I meant to write something more epic this week – grit, bravado, the whole thing – but my hormones and my brain conspired otherwise. Inspiration was absent, and I was too energetically chaotic to go looking for it.

Mercedes, though – she’s always there. Because she isn’t just a character I write. She’s a part of me that I can visit whenever I want. (Er, correction: whenever I ask nicely and give her space to be heard.)

I started doing parts work with my therapist several years ago. At first it was nebulous and felt, honestly, made-up. Looking back, I can see I struggled initially because I was missing two crucial things: permission to access my creativity and the small, stubborn lack of fear required to assert it – to just do the thing without immediately judging it or making it mean something about who I am.

I was super creative as a kid: crafts, instruments, poems, invented games – acting ridiculous just because it was fun. But then I grew up, pruned myself into a pragmatic scientist, and started paying bills.

Nothing kills whimsy like “reality.”

Society trains us to believe art is frivolous and real success means a big paycheck. And sure, I want tangible comfort – but somewhere along the way I traded my creativity for it.

So when I first tried parts work, it felt like trying to lower a bucket down into a boarded-up, abandoned well – one I’d sealed off myself. That was kind of a wake-up call.

But I didn’t quit. Because once I got the first drops from that sacred well – the stories, the voices, the wisdom – I knew I had to stay tethered there. It’s where the magic lives.

What a privilege to be its steward.

So today, when writing doesn’t come easily – when all I really want to do is crawl back into bed with a cat on my chest and Enya on repeat – I can still drop in on Mercedes.

Usually she’s the one interrogating me. Today she’s the one being deposed, and she’s not having a great time with it.

She needs space. Which means I do, too. So I’ll step back and listen.

She always circles back – in her own time.

With all my wild heart,

Sadie xo

P.S. If something I said resonated — and you’re craving a space to unpack your own story — get in touch with me. I’d be honored to hold that space for you.