just breathe, they said, and how do you even begin to do that when your very core has been clenched for so long, not by muscles but by the invisible, relentless grip of all the 'what ifs' and 'must dos' and 'can't fails,' a pressure that doesn't let up until you realize it's become the default setting for your entire being and then, when the space opens up, those sudden fifteen minutes I found myself with today, it’s not release right away, it’s a sudden, almost disorienting void, like the ground dropped out from under the constant vigilance. my hands, they persist in hovering, reaching, searching for the next task that isn’t there, a phantom residue of service in my fingertips, a kind of involuntary memory, and it makes me think of the person who used to just know what to do with a moment like this, the one who would pick up a book and fall into other worlds, a simple fifteen minutes of escape before exhaustion took hold, but that person, that instinct, feels almost absent, like a language I used to speak fluently but have now forgotten the cadence of, the very rhythm of stillness feels alien. and then mom, yesterday, she said my name again, not the vacant stare, but a real flicker, and for a second, the universe just clicked, a strange, beautiful resonance that sits in my ribcage now, a different kind of fullness, and then the money from my brother, it landed in the account, a dull, familiar chime, a sound that doesn’t quite penetrate the deeper hunger but it does feed the soil, the red earth here in rural virginia, and the rose bush, finally, it’s a riot of color, a blazing, defiant answer to all those seasons of bare branches, and even if i don’t quite know how to simply exist in this strange, unbound time, the colors, they just exist, vibrantly.