My sleep is shifting with the seasons. I think numbness helps take the edge off, but I have no longing for that type of thing anymore. I’m not sure when that happened, but monotony is echoing from chambers I won’t trespass. I haven’t been writing as much- I wrestle with the idea that my life is calm and I have nothing to wallow in. But the stillness feels eerie- like there’s an intruder in my mind and I can’t find where they’re hiding. Maybe I’m growing, but a part of me refuses to bend- I plant my feet firmly in soil that gives where tree roots meet the ground- one of us has to give in and it won’t be me.

My friends are moving in different directions and I don’t know where to hold that feeling. I still treat the forest like a magical portal that’ll take me away from the world. Moonlight cascading through every opening and I know there’s something beyond it. I think that’s where my father lives.

There’s plenty of versions of myself and lately I’ve been choosing none of them. I’m sinking into the background noise and it muffles all the laughter. I can’t decide if this is a calmness before something crashes through my world, or a shift towards better things- whatever that means. Sometimes you need stillness and a cigarette- not every vice has left me, I promise.

The other day Brianne and I were sitting on her front porch. She held her baby and I pictured her covered in glitter laughing with her entire heart with eyes that matched the sky. Falling over sidewalks as laughter carried us home. Drunken off summer fever- it never made us sick until one day it did. That’s girlhood, right? Now we have to redefine it into something more tangible- something steady. These things claw at the back of my mind- and it’s not that I won’t let them in. I just don’t have a place to host them.

Last night I tossed and turned. I kept thinking about the dust collecting in the corners of my windowsill. How it piles and piles and piles. How noticeable it must be. How I need to clean up every single fucking mess. -AMT©️