waking up

Nothing stays the same, and yet everything here is almost as I left it. My kitchen looks like it did in 1998 when we first moved into this house, but I opened my silverware drawer today and found we have a new divider. My bathroom has had the same shower curtain for years, but it was completely bare because my parents were showing our house to prospective buyers. My cats are getting old and my parents' friends are getting sick. And my friends are still goofy and dumb, but they've changed too, marked by the dark approachment of adulthood and independence.

This past summer was a standstill for me. Things were hot and simple and fun but I felt like I was missing so much of my life in D.C. And when I came back in the fall, people had changed and I guess I had too. It's hard to know where I am and what I want. I feel like a ball rolling toward an undetermined destination without a conscious mind. Sometimes I open my eyes and it's like I've been on autopilot for the last couple of weeks and my life has been cycling without me. Like I've been watching myself go through motions, watching myself fuck things up, watching myself be selfish, mean, careless.

But other times I feel good, like I'm doing things right, different, better. Like I'm meeting the world rather than waiting for it.

My life is different now: different than it was two years ago, last year, last summer. I have to find a way to be okay with it.

climbing with no harness

I sense that we are

Losing our ground.

I’m trying not to fall but

I am constantly grabbing a stone

That is slipping.

I am smoking with asthma

I am drinking with a sick liver

I am buying furry cat upon furry cat—

And sneezing all the while.

I sense that our tongues are drying.

I talk for hours to my bedroom wall.

What a pleasant companion it is:

Stuck holding the floor and the ceiling together

Forced, then, to listen to my incessant chatter,

My insecure wonderings,

My silly questions—

Such silly questions.

I hear the creaking of a door closing,

Anticipating the wind in my face when it is finally

Shut.