the buzzing behind my eyes, it's not exhaustion, not quite, more like an agitation, a kind of vibrational hum that settles deep behind the optic nerves from trying to hold onto a face that isn’t mine anymore, like putting on a mask that’s two sizes too small and feeling the edges dig in, and the words just formed, all those rehearsed phrases from a time before, about the stable job and "making good choices" and how it all just slid out so smoothly, a slick performance I thought I’d cleansed from my muscle memory, the way it felt so utterly… WRONG, even though it came out so right, the kind of right that makes my skin feel like it’s trying to escape, like it’s vibrating on its own frequency, trying to shed itself right there by the counter where the kombucha sits, mocking me with its fizz, because I bottled myself up again, just like I thought I’d finally, finally stopped doing, and the dizzying expanse of freedom I thought I'd earned, it felt so compressed, so small in that moment, but it's not small, it’s just a ghost of the cage, its shadow, not the cage itself, because the door is truly open, and I can feel my spine realigning, slowly, even now, just thinking about it, feeling the shift like soft plates finding their way back into alignment, and that is a KIND of peace, in its own restless, unsettling way, a truth beneath the tremor, a truth that just knows what it's reaching for, even if my hands don't always know what they're doing with the clay or the twine or whatever comes next, but it is always, always reaching.