In The Morning Everything At Once Is Ours

Sometimes you wake up and you're twenty-six and you wonder how you got here. Not here here as in the bed your parents bought you when you were a teen under the blanket you stole from an old roommate and surrounded by your favorite novels and thrift store furniture with its chipped corners and mis-matched drawer pulls. Not here as in this state where you weren't born and houses none of your family though they've visited once or twice the way fireflies appear to light-up summer nights but don't stick around during the harsher seasons. Not even here in this body with its dips and freckles that don't line up to proper constellations that feels so unfamiliar that as you stare into the mirror with you hair clipped short like a boys that you feel like you're looking at a stranger. Just here as in this stage of life like a yellow dwarf emerging from nebula and this laundry list of tasks beside your bed scrawled in blue ink and confused by the doodles you've been drawing since high school art class helped you survive. But how did you get here? The futures you pictured as a child flicker through your memory like a Super 8 film, each scenario as improbable as dragons you still wished existed and the library within an abandoned lighthouse you wanted to build when you were eight when living on some rocky outcrop surrounded by dead poets and pounding waves seemed better than chocolate cake. But in time you learned your life was not a novel and the dreams of your childhood are pieces of yourself like your hair that you clip every month that keep growing back. So you wake up with these tangled thoughts and you don't really know how you got here, but you figure you better put on some clothes and wash your face and make the most of it.