awful normals and air conditioning.

"At a certain part in your life, probably when too much of it has gone by, you will open your eyes and see yourself for who you are. Especially for everything that made you so different from all the awful normals. And you will say to yourself, 'But I am this person.' And in that statement, in that correction, there will be a kind of love."

-Phoebe in Wonderland

In sudden stillness - 

if a 102 degree humid day can ever be completely motionless...

in the kind of air that is hard to move through or even lift your hands - 

my words hung around my neck

strangling me to the steady sound of the window unit.

Hearing, but not feeling.

I searched back through time trying to find an explanation.

A reason for this place.
All the while frantically grasping, but not flinching. 

Laying there, it wasn't until I felt the cool air faintly tickling my skin that 

I pulled myself out of comparisons 

and other things akin.
And something lifted me up off the carpeted ground,
just as I was. Who I am. 

photo by Olle Eriksson