babyfat

I find my cursor on the site of a deeply seated issue and suddenly I am 12 and looking for someone to hear me once more. Whether I am rectifying old mistakes or repeating them I'm unsure of, my life is a circle that was drawn closed too early. 

It's as though I've grown but in none of the ways that matter, the rounded cheeks I was told would give way to the contoured face of a woman remain a part of my reflection even as I plummet into an adulthood I was never prepared for. No one Is truly prepared, I know, but I was never supposed to liken myself to sisyphus at 7. 

I've outgrown all my escapist fantasy plots (I'm too old to go to Xavier's school for the gifted) and instead wander a world I'm barely awake in. Months pass in the blink of an eye, on a waking day I squeeze my fingers to see if I am truly here, flex them around a coffee cup I barely feel the warmth of.

I slept through a class and woke up with the type of residual, untranslatable dream material that colors the rest of your day. Acute moments of awareness that brought me back to certain moments of lucidity from a childhood too murky to recall in full, memories of a smell, or an abstract feeling, nonlinear parallels, blips and beacons of awareness along an otherwise somnambulantly gray timeline. 

I've slipped back into a (slightly more) favorable line of thought. There is no one I want and the knowledge is like solace. Unattainable has a different flavor than non-existent. It matters a little less whether I'll ever be a person smiling sweetly in a photo without seeming horribly distorted. I venture back to myself, away from the echo chamber of the expectations of youth. I want to build myself from within instead of retreating, I want to shake the feeling of imposterdom engrained so deep it feels like marrow. Maybe only pills can fix me but I cannot bring myself to antidote the poison of my mind at the expense of my body. I must choose between being imprisoned in mind or  body, I've been deprived the basic right to both.