24

Espresso and tequila. A soft whisper in the corner of my head, vaguely reminding me of my own voice but I couldn’t be sure, it morphs and wavers constantly. I search for familiarity but I’m used to isolation.. as the only child, and the daughter, my last name is going to die with me.. the last thing I would do is give my kid a hyphenated last name. It’s gonna be the father’s and the father’s only. Another wavering phenomenon: the idea of having a kid at all. All I know is that I wasn’t able to envision myself as a mother for quite some time, but lately it is becoming more and more plausible. Everything that once meant nothing to me is transforming into true potential. My mother bought me a rose quartz necklace with a seashell charm. Not long after that, everything changed. I think believing in crystals is about as reliable as believing in horoscopes, but I have always believed in karma and intuition. A clouded, convoluted intuition is just as valuable as one clear as day. Summer rain is a mystery like the sweltering turn of fall. September arrives.. leaves darken.. the patina overcoming them resembles rust, and somewhere you’re asking yourself why it’s hotter than it was in July. Then October comes and halfway through I will turn twenty four. That number is terrifying to me.. it just feels too real. Like I can’t make excuses anymore. But I know it’s likely that not much will change, there is no linear predictability to any of this shit, there is no paint by numbers solution, there is no glistening path making itself known. It is in my hands ultimately (unfortunately), I have to at least kick the gear and get it turning before the machine can realize its purpose, and for whatever (and many) reasons that sense of power is terrifying to me. I wish I could control nothing. That is why I often succumb to impulsivity, no matter how destructive it may be. Let me control nothing, let me have power over nothing, let me be carried to everything. What an alluring idea–but nothing more. It billows in the breeze like silken petals, curling and unfurling in perfect rhythm, or how your lover’s breath gently cascades over your skin, igniting an amalgamation of sparks that hover, embers that crackle and crash like the reverberating sound of a firework that has just departed. You can’t hide from control forever. The breeze turns harsher, colder, and the chills scatter pin pricks into the fabric of your interior. Sewing a path of traceable beginnings and ends, you thread the needle and all makes sense again, then you tie the knot and think you got to the bottom of something. The bottom is only the beginning of another trudge, another biting climb, clawing your fingers into the dirt and caking them with viscous filth. You begin to dry heave, sweat drips down, you’re gasping for a proper clean breath to little avail. You dig and dig and everything sinks deeper as you cling onto the will you have left, and you find yourself at the zenith once again, above it all and the fragments of dirt evaporate into dust and float away from your body.. they are of little concern now.. almost twenty four years of this, God only knows how many more.