Today I could feel myself longing for the past. For the people who occupy the shadowed corners of my mine that I'm too ashamed to talk about with the people of the present. I miss homes that no longer exist, clothes that I no longer fit, hair that I no longer have. I miss feelings that I've built up in my mind so much that I'm not sure if they ever existed, or if it was just something I made up in my head after the fact.

I'm a sucker for romance, but the kind synonymous with suffering. I don't love things until I let them go, I don't leave places until they feel like home. It's stupid, I know, but I need it. I'm addicted to nostalgia, addicted to cliches.

I spent some time walking on the beach today, and especially watching all the baby sandpipers running up and down in the approaching waves, rushing into the foam for a quick bath or darting their sharp beaks forward, catching creatures so small that I couldn't even see them, perfectly framed by a raspberry pink sunset behind them. I noticed that not one but two of the little baby birds were missing legs; they skittered awkwardly on a single painfully small leg. I wanted to scoop them up and cry because I pitied them, and I assumed that they would be dead within weeks; if they couldn't dart around fast enough to catch food, they would just wither and die a slow and painful death. As I walked towards them however, they were lost in the frantic pattering and rushing around of their siblings. In the heat of the moment, when trying to evade me, they looked no different from any of the other baby birds.

I think sometimes I feel like those little birds with only one leg to hop on. When I can bury myself in a rush of activity and stress and frantic keeping up, when I barely have time to think and almost no time to catch up with friends, that is when I feel safe. It is in the still moments that I can be found out to just be hobbling around on one leg. It is in the still moments that I feel like other people can see me as incomplete, as barely hanging on, as missing a vital part.

That is what I've started to feel in Florida. I've taken two months off my job in order to reset and unwind, from a hellish year that oftentimes caused me to scream into my pillow in the middle of the night, to burst into tears while watching a funny tv show, or caused me to be snappy with people I really cared about. I felt burnt out. I was suffering from compassion fatigue, and overwhelmed by a hard re-entry into a pre-Covid world and mindset. I needed to regroup before I moved on to the next stage in my life and so I settled into an apartment on the beach with my partner and did nothing for a month and a half but read books, go for long bike rides, walk on the beach, and do puzzles for hours on end.

It was in this time that I became aware again of the lack when I looked in the mirror. All I could see what a phantom missing limb, a sense of being incomplete or broken. I've experienced a lot of insecurity and anger in the past six weeks because this was the first time in a year that I allowed myself to feel things, to settle into my grief and to start to heal from a year of sprinting full tilt. It's easy to hide your brokenness if you're running too fast for observation, but it's also easier to fall.

Even here, I feel like I'm barely holding myself together, that I'm still pretending that everything is okay while inside I am hurting, I am heaving. I am processing being forcibly penetrated during a casual hookup last year, with a man who didn't use protection and had the gall to look me in the face while doing it, and convincing me afterwards that my eyes were giving consent. I am processing my trip to Iceland, where I fell in love with my partner all over again, and then in the Reykjavik airport we held each other close and said goodbye. I am processing my brother's arrest and imprisonment for a crime that seems so violently implausible for him to commit, but yet has surprised me that it took him so long to do it. I am processing a complicated and terrible relationship with my stepmother, who asked me for forgiveness for the way she treated me over ten years ago. It was the first time we had talked and the last time as well, because she died from cancer six months later.

It's hard because I know I need to talk about this, but I don't feel like I should give this information up just yet. There's a part of me that is ashamed to admit it, but I secretly enjoy feeling broken, enjoy the taste of blood in my mouth. If I'm hurting, I know I am still alive.