it’s strange, almost unsettling, to feel such a deep calm while others around you are just starting to unravel, a sort of hum in my bones recognizing the newness of their brokenness, but my own breath, it just settles deeper, like roots finding even firmer purchase in the dark earth, and it makes me think about how i used to believe the only way out was to become someone else entirely, to shed every single memory like old skin, but that’s not it at all, you just stretch, you expand into the person who holds it all, the BEFORE and the after, the gaping space and the fragile new growth, you learn to stretch and hold it all, like the way my fingers sometimes curl around the empty space where the second coffee mug should be, and there isn't that violent snap anymore, just a soft curve of memory and a different kind of warmth in my palm.