years ago, when i would climb fully clothed into a dry bathtub to cry, i would think about atoms.
my own, specifically. though whether any of them are still mine, i do not know.
the atoms making my bones, my liver, my lungs, are older than stars.
what were they before me?
that's not the question that scared me. what scared me, scares me still, is if i am made of anyone else. and if they should despise what they had become.

but at the end of history, for it has finally come, it seems silly.
who cares what i am made of?
the world is full of death and fire and shoes with separate toes.
why waste the time to care about the history of my skin?
and while this voice who belongs to nobody makes an excellent point, and i am aware of my ridiculousness as it pours down my face, i cannot shake it.
our minds have not evolved to fit the whole world. i cannot visualise it.
the great, stomping, climate-change godzilla is transient. he phases through the walls of my brain like a ghost, chains scraping along the floor as he goes.
but he finds me, as he leaves me, alone with myself.

and that, i can never run from.

i can cut my hair off with fabric scissors in the middle of the night. i can fill my empty hours with meaningless, instant content i forget as soon as it ends. i can move houses, cities, entire continents. but in blasted spite of every effort, it's still me.
of course i preoccupy myself. it's the one thing from which i shall never escape.

there is no way to trace my body backwards through time. that i know.
i will be myself for the rest of my life. that i also know.
planet earth may not outlive me. makes a trinity of knowledge i have.

so where do i go? stuck inside a body who feels like a stranger, hurtling ever forwards on an increasingly broken world.
i would love someone to come to me, preferably accompanied with a cloud of smoke and ****** of crows, and give me the secret of a life that never feels like static.
but that's only because I'm waiting for a quest that won't come.

no, the solution is far less fantastical, far less the stuff of poetry.
i have to learn to like myself. to know them, trust them, to build a foundation stronger than anything i can break it with.
and though i have already started, i am nowhere near finished. maybe i never will be.
but that is a fear i am letting go of, finger by finger, releasing my grip on.
eventually the wind can sweep it away, and i can forget.