i like life better in the sunshine, with windows open so i can hear the concerto that the person across the street is playing. i like life better when im vulnerable, to people, to places, to circumstances i could never have predicted. i like life better when things happen that i don't expect, even if they are a little unfortunate, the kind of things you explain in confessional tones. i like life better when i'm constantly aware just how lucky i am to be this in love with someone after all this time. i don't know when or why or how i stopped needing people, stopped confiding in them, stopped exposing the raw and fleshy parts of myself in candid conversation and didn't flinch in anticipation of their response. i don't know how it's been this long since something happened that made me just need to call someone, anyone, who might understand even the smallest part of what it meant to me. i don't know how i let myself get to the point where i was so surprised when they knew exactly what to say. it's a simple and stale simile, but i'm a bit like an island these days. the world exists around me, but days and weeks and months go by and i forget that it has the ability to influence me. then a little salt water laps up further on the shore than i was expecting, and i can't help but think how i'm even more vulnerable now than i ever was when i trusted people and depended on them, no matter how many times they disappointed me.

yesterday i had an epiphany & realized that facades and years of practice pretending i'm something tougher than i am will never change the fundamental core of my fear. there's so much we can afford to lose and mourn still. and then there's those fundamental truths you spend your whole life avoiding. you think of death as something that happens to other people. you expect to live longer than the average person, to accomplish more than them. to be luckier, somehow. but we're all vulnerable, no matter what we do or how we live. we're all helpless no matter how much we plan and contrive and hypothesize. i used to think that success in life depended on pushing it all out of your mind, of living boldly, defiantly. maybe people who expect to live longer do. maybe people who think they are lucky create their own luck. but maybe i'm supposed to be aware of how fragile it all is so i actually want to keep living, trying, embarrassing myself with how much i still have yet to figure out no matter how many sophisticated sentences i pen, no matter how much distance i place between me and living to try and understand this experience. maybe, just maybe, it's the only thing that can get me to drop the act and simply exist.