love, read, write

It's October. Two months away from winter. My skin is already peeling in keen anticipation of the bony tree branches that will adorn my window like a vignette. The draft that will seep in through the cracks and blanket over my face when I sleep. The early darkness, the late mornings.

I've already begun to prepare – a slow retraction from my friends, gradual infrequency of meals, slightly longer naps. Fewer showers. No music. No laughter.

When it feels right, even, I practice arching my back. I know it is too early. Sometimes I get ahead of myself. Some form of muffled excitement gets me antsy in the afternoon and I strip myself naked and stand bent in front of the mirror, inspecting the bony arch of my spine. The little bumps along the curve, like the triangular plates on the back of a dinosaur. I can feel them growing, protruding. Transforming me. The beginnings of a rumble start to bubble somewhere between my pelvis and gut. It feels imminent. I am about to tip over into a roar. I close my eyes and focus on that bubbling, the heat that is stewing within me, vibrating into my knees. I bend forward even more until my hair is touching the ground. The floor might crumble beneath me. I imagine my back snapping itself into the proper arch. I can't wait to dissolve into the shadows of winter.

It is hard to know how much of this desire is detectable to the human eye. People might say that I'm strange, but not much beyond that. Maybe someone will look at me funny at the grocery store if I accidentally slip into my posture while reaching for flour on the bottom shelf. Or if I show up particularly disheveled to a friend's dinner, refuse mimosas, and speak twice in total. Or my staunch refusal of greetings and small talk at work. But generally I like to think that nobody can really tell, and that by the time winter arrives, my existence will quietly exit everyone's memory, leaving just a pinhole for me to re-enter in spring. There are no good-byes given; to them, I have just taken a very long nap.

November is typically when I begin to prepare for my hibernation. This is what my mother taught me. When you get really used to it, honey, she said, it'll even be two weeks. But that comes with experience. Aim for a month. She's right, two weeks seems impossible to me right now. But I'm twenty-six. You'd think I'd at least have gotten it down to three and a half weeks by now.

(i wrote this last year and forgot that i wrote it (it is fiction))

>> STUCK IN A DATA CENTER

in high school the internet felt boundless. it was free in a way that my body didn't feel free. i had this running joke where i'd tell my friends i don't exist in a clumsy attempt to express the casual dissociation i was dealing with– but the internet was this place where i felt real, where i was finding ways to feel like me. it was something i looked forward to every day: i'd come home from school and i'd sit at my desk and the moment the screen loaded, my body would dissolve and i would beam my conscious mind into the internet where i could exist untethered. my senses would hone into the screen, plugged in by convenience store earbuds, eyes fixed on the 13 inch window into a malleable world that could respond to my imagination. it satiated something i didn't know i was hungry for. i was free of my limbs, the concern directed at my body, the conversations happening in doctor's rooms, the muffled frustration i felt towards the things my physical self failed to express on behalf of the real me. the real me, the one that could simply exist uninterrupted on the internet. i told myself my soul lived there, not here. i could finally speak.

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My mother was a rather private person. This was not apparent to me as a child; I presumed that all mothers were like mine – reserved, secretive, sparing in her words. She was a ghost of a woman, floating in and out of my life, leaving only traces of her cedarwood perfume and the echoes of her heels clicking down the hallway of our apartment complex. 

Our conversations were always just short of something real. Occasionally, during dinner, she might ask, "how was your day?" and I would reply, "good," and after a pause she'd nod, "good, good." And we would spend the rest of the meal in silence. I would sit at the edge of my seat, a flower leaning in closer to the sun.

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