I can’t. I can’t explain it to you. I thought I was doing better. I thought I had a grip on it. I thought I had finally acquired the kind of audacity it takes to actually be in the world, to not just be its wise-cracking commentator and occasional partner in crime. But that’s the thing about it, right? You never get the clean outs, the locked-down, spaced-out, p-p-pew *finger-gun* cutovers you expect from meaning-making brains.

Only this, my shoe’s stepped on mud and blood and somebody’s pajamas and there’s a dead spider on the mirror that’s supposed to make me look thinner to myself and therefore to the world.

It wasn’t as if I weren’t/wasn’t at the party. If you could stuff about three of me in one of me that’d be the me that’s sucking the virtual reality out of actual reality so bad some interplanetary shit’s log book’s gotta have picked up that nonsensical blip off the radar: she was just looking at trees, esse, why did she register euphoria?

Because I can, you interplanetary guardians of the whatever it is you’re guarding in the first place, the cosmos don’t need guidance, it’s doing very well by itself, thank you. Oh, I imagined you? Okay, that’s probably more on-brand than sudden satoris in the middle of a road trip.

I almost died, reader, maybe. Maybe not. Some medical thing or other, it always, always walks me down roads I know the way my fingers know a truly random password better than my actual brain. I don’t want to go there. But I was twelve when I’d lose hours just thinking about how boring eternity would be, and why the hell was that the unique value proposition of the after life? It was the earliest mindfuck I remember that never quite left my heart.

I wish I could tell you now I know where this is going. I’m afraid, sometimes, when my chest hurts, when my head gets these random zaps and residual symptoms of that forgettable brain attack, that I’d lost time, and power, that I had let myself down, relaxed too much, smiled too much, proiritized projects that weren’t the thing that would make me happy.

But the weird thing, days right after what happened, I wasn’t thinking about the big things, not at all. Not about legacy, not about love, not about not having given everything I could while I was still whole. It was the little things that threatened to destroy me: not being able to walk aimlessly alone around Marikina, not being able to truly let go in the moment for fear my heart rate would go up some imaginary threshold of sudden death, not being able to remember what my body was like before all this.

They didn’t destroy me, though. They became little goals. Each pin prick, each spasm, each misplaced pain, I think: okay, we’re just rewiring. We’re rewiring. We’re rewiring. You’re getting better. Even if there are days I swear I never will. There are days when I forget I was ever in danger.

Right now, as I write this, I can fool myself, that the words I’m typing (I’ll edit some day, I swear) can manage to penetrate this imaginary digital wall of numbers and signals so I can touch your brain and tell you, you lost motherfucker, that you got it good. Whatever it is you have, you got it good. You got it better than a hundred million other people in the world. And it’s okay if you don’t feel crazy about it. Because I’m probably you, in all the best ways, and I thought I lost it and then I didn’t and then I lost it again and then I figured maybe you don’t need to struggle so hard.

Maybe the trees are looking back into your core saying, “What an actual wuss. None of this matters.” *leaves flutter mockingly and lovingly all at once*

And THAT’S the best part.