Words.

I remember when my weight was distributed into the shape of a person. Not a human, necessarily, but a physical collection of parts that worked together as harmoniously as anything so flawed and organic could hope to. My mind was a halogen bulb perched atop the streetlight of my spinal column, which wound its way toward a distant army of toes between layers of muscle and half-moon arcs of bone. Bodies are insubordinate, obstinate things, always taking matters into their own hands, but mine was distinct from everyone else’s; its edges were sharply delineated, like those of a figure gracelessly added to a scene at the last minute. I felt so completely like myself that meditation was a necessary vacation, a rare opportunity to relax my cartoonish ink outline for a few minutes at a time.

A person, an observer, a writer: an island off the coast of us.

Time has eroded the gradients between me and not-me; the island seems much closer to the shore now, more a protrusion than a foreign body. This is not the joyful oneness that hippie teachers debate with their dilated pupils, the sort which transforms one’s fingers into tree roots and conflates whispers with the breezes they ride. No, it is the disturbing unease that comes from fatigue-blur, the melding of foreground and background that speaks harshly of the photographer’s issues with aperture. A lack of personal space. I am a bundle of vague neuroses, a vat-child formed by the total institution that beckons toward a grand future with one hand as it squeezes with the other. A bonsai girl, snipped into pleasing shapes that work so well in this walled garden beneath the ivory tower.

To hell with that.

The fire is still in my belly, that cauterising heat which sears my edges shut. I’ve been buoyed along by the human river for almost three years now, and that’s more than long enough; it’s one thing to stick around a while in order to catch the big fish, but keeping one’s head below the water until it marries one’s lungs is quite another. I’ll finish my degree because it is important, and because I want to know where the road leads – but it’s time to remember what sets me apart. It’s time to write again.