Time lost linearity two years ago. I am in some form of eternity now. 26 and 27 were headless years, and 28 is a black hole, a spiraling sense of detachment from everything and everyone.

I move through these years like amniotic fluid looking for a body and like a body looking for amniotic fluid to sink back into. 25 was the last seemingly real year of my life before I walked through a door I can never reverse out of.

I sometimes wish that I could go back, if only for the comfort of familiarity, if only to sink back into the ‘miserability’ that I used to know so well—as if it was the first and only skin I ever had. For a long time, it was the only skin I ever had. I miss repetition. Now everything’s new.

In many ways, I am ending, and in many ways, I am beginning, but I am also in between, watching it all happen, realizing that this process is forever now and that I will never be the same as I was two years ago or even yesterday. And I miss who I used to be because even if she was too much—and only ever knew how to live outside her body— at least she was familiar.

And I, I am not familiar anymore.

I have watched every identity I ever had disintegrate within and without me, leaving me with an emptiness that has been both fascinating and frightening. I am slowly becoming finite. I am slowly seeing all my edges (no longer borderless, no longer shapeless, no longer always and only outside myself. For the first time in my life, it has become so quiet in my head, but it has come at the cost of everyone I used to be.

There goes that choking sweetness, there goes that hiding deer, there go the only me’s I’ve ever known.

Who am I without my selves?

That’s what I’m slowly figuring out.