my sternum feels almost hollow sometimes, not in a bad way, not empty like it used to be, more like a drum that’s been tapped too many times and now just vibrates with the echo of it all, when that stranger on the bus looked right through me, not into me but THROUGH me, like they saw the whole goddamn blueprint, it wasn’t that clenching anymore, no desperate scramble to pull back behind whatever illusion I was trying to maintain, just this exposed feeling, like my skin suddenly understood the summer air in a way it never did before and it’s a nakedness that isn’t cold, it’s just… there, part of the landscape, like those dust motes still dancing above the floorboards here in this studio above the laundromat, each one catching the faint light from the window, each one its own tiny, unknowable journey, and sometimes I feel like one of them, just drifting, utterly insignificant, and that’s where the power is, I think, not in being the BIG thing, not in all the grand narratives, but just in that quiet, suspended drift, and it’s why I still pour that black coffee, every single goddamn day, the bitter taste a perfect anchor when everything else feels like it could just float away.