Inside(s)

a rambling-bo-bambling. Words and prose and words and prose

I’ve had a lot of time to think. Lately, I’ve been wandering the circle of my neighborhood at night, losing myself in the burn of house lights puddling across frozen lawns. There’s a stillness here. Now.

In this life.

I mentioned it to my friend the other day at lunch,

“It’s new but not unwanted.” I’d said. She looked at me as if it’d been a lie.

Maybe it was. I’m not sure. God, am I ever?

Yesterday, I’d spent my morning getting probed by cold hands and a medical wand, as my doctor attempted to diagnose me with another illness. I had the urge to ask her what she thought of my skin, if there was a look about me that told her that I was, in a way, a bridge.

Is it visible, the sickness?

I then remembered the stack of pages I’d handed her when I stepped into her office months ago. It’s a weird existence, having to catalog scars. I’d finally begun to live a physical life instead of a mental one and here we were in the stillness, my body beginning to shut down.

Romantic toward logic, desperate for time. How do you reason with yourself in this?

Keep the big light on, let me make my way home.

On my own terms.

I mark the stops.

I’m starting to wonder if a dive has to be endured, if the cracks in the asphalt beneath my feet will lead me to it - to the warmth on my tongue…the heat in his eyes.

Just open the door.

I hadn’t realized until recent, the let down of being awake. How it all just feels like an exhale, an after. The epiphany expelled trips and crafts and themed dinners with friends — but also a new want, to be better, not just good. It’s a pivotal exchange of thought, something that drastically rewrites my identity.

The self I know is someone meant to live alone in an apartment somewhere in a city. She kisses windows but never hovers. This self writes for a living. She fixates on the breath of the sleeping. I dreamt of her before I knew it, before I understood the veil between sleep and death.

Now, this self dreams of waking up without shoes and treading through the front lawn with a baby at arm’s length. She lifts the pane. She crawls

inside.

And in the morning, I water hanging flowers. I strip the bed, bored of the scent left by another. I write for the sake of writing. I live in the sun. I am both soft and strong and more than medical records.

And it is still, new, but not unwanted,

living in the house.