something had settled in my lungs again. it's been there before, a familiar restlessness. but before, i threw it up in the form of late nights and lost love. this year i hold it in palmfuls, like a bird or water.

my legs feel full of bees, of ants and moths trying to stretch towards light. cross, uncross, stretch and coil. do anything to remain unsettled, unsedimented. but they can't escape the unrest. it just waits.

i think of it like sediment, silt that sometimes has a hand run through it or a toe seeped deep into its coolness and then it stirs through my veins alongside every particle of anxiety i've inherited.

is this what it's supposed to look like? a little dim and maybe foggy on the darker days. sometimes i think about letting this fog out into the chilly room of someone else, but it retreats just in time.

beds were designed for tired bones, nights designed for weighted eyes. days were made for the ones with fingers full of light and flowers were made for it all. the night comes easier to me, like a friend.

January isn't my usual month of bee-legged unrest, or heavy lidded nights, but it seems to have assumed the role of injecting something not settled into the crook of my neck, my elbow and the soft part behind my ear.