My feet don’t wander mindlessly to the same spot over and over again, obeying some internal command like a corrupted child. My eyes never search a crowd to only lock them on the same face once more. 

Instead, when given the gilded chance, one longed for and loved after, my feet run, and my eyes explore, for I have never felt permanent nor real nor concrete in my life—in who I am. 

Instead of a home, a land, a smile to lovingly live within, I exist in fleeting feelings, lost love, and nefarious nostalgia like a cloud breaking through the trees.

I exist there—wherever that is—between the rising breath of the world.

I exist in those moments where the wind whirls wildly, undefeated by humanity’s need for control. Those moments where dance dangles daringly from windowsills, an invitation to meet yet another stranger—another friend. Those moments where the sand hugs your feet as if it had been waiting so lonesomely long just to greet you once again. 

I exist in those memories of momentary marriage between harmony and happiness. Those moments where my ear closes against a blue pillow yet opens to a stranger. Those moments where my feet fight against another breathing brick wall to be free once more out the window. Those moments where sweet smiles signal such joy—such exuberance and enchantment—with time itself.

I can exist there, and I have. I have existed with all my might, marred with mimicking mortification, in the face of whatever giant comes next.

Yet I can’t exist here.

I can’t breathe, I can’t feel, I can’t smile.

I can’t—in every sense of the restricting contraction of not—exist here, in this state, in this way, in this lack of love.

And it hurts.

There’s no fancy word for it; there’s no alliteration or metaphor or allusion to my torment. There’s a box, a barrier, a broken blockade, and there’s me, trivial but trying, cowering beneath the horrifying height of it all. I cower beneath the behemoth blocking beauty and benevolence from my grimly grasping hands.

It’s a height I can’t handle; it’s a height I can’t scale or hop, even if my screams sink into sobs that creak out of the darkest depths of my heart. 

I have felt what it’s like on the other side of that wall, over the barrier, out of the box. Those injured sobs implore for that feeling before, that feeling of more, and that’s what makes this so parlous—what makes theses ideas, these words, these feelings so harrowingly hard.

Because that evanescent ecstasy in those moments was so real, but everything now is not.

So when will I feel it again?