Old notes-to-self ask, “When will my life stop feeling like I’m trying to outrun and bemoan the present in service of a better future?” and “Will any amount of change actually be able to fix the pit in my chest?”

The domestic world isn’t made for me, much in the same way that a highway bisects a migratory corridor, threatened in ways I don’t even understand. I saw a Dodge Charger smoke a deer so hard that one of her legs came off her body, her friends overlooking the scene from afar. She waits for the dermestids and spores and crows to return her, bit by bit, back to the earth. I’m her and I’m her companions and I’m the surrounding grass and the pavement and I might also be the guy in the car. Do fungi experience rich inner lives? Their baseline fear level is probably better than a deer’s but they probably do somehow feel the faceted turmoil of being alive. I simultaneously know a devastating amount and nothing at all.

It seems it doesn’t much matter how fulfilling my life becomes. Some of us do just have to fight this relentless but delicate fight, a night fight, one wherein the goal is to wake up the next morning and pretend to be human, and begin again. No amount of change or daily spectacle is distracting enough to make me forget that time passes for others while I spend my time trying to make myself feel less disparate. I don’t hear the frogs anymore, once my only solace through sleeplessness.

I want to look forward to mornings, to moving slowly in the light, to calm space untempered by my own mortal coil, without guilt, without my hands curled into fists. Magpies skipping across railings for scraps and junk mail blown off the counter by the air of an open window.

No human place will ever make perfect sense to me, creature that I am. But sometimes you do have to start over and grieve what once was and cry through it, and things will never be the same ever again, but that’s because you’re a different version of yourself than you recognize, and everything will be okay, but it will definitely not be the same, not even close.

Sometimes I want an older version of myself to hold me and shake the unrelenting fear out of me, someone who can definitively tell me that everything will be fine; someone to tell me that it turned out to be worth it.

Get up. It’s time to be human again.