Once I was something resembling balance. Well fed and well kept, ruled by frivolous rules and order. But that’s long since not been true. Now I’m a stray, getting closer and closer to feral.

I’m not sure which roof I’ll find myself under, when I’ll taste my first food of day. Only in sleep do I resemble the thing I once was. But everything else is altered, the waving lines of a mirage. I’m not as kept as I used to be. Hardly the same animal.

I often find pockets of solace in that. What will come, this is better. There was a girl I’ve been who would have traded everything I have since parted with to know the love I know, to glimpse into the future I see. And so I still sleep well under whichever roof it will be.

But it’s not lost on me how often I’ve thought about power, how completely I’ve embraced that it is the most traded currency in the world. And that I’ve chosen the most powerless world for myself I can imagine. Even in comfort, I am a sapling expecting the turning of the soil. Even in stillness, I feel the teetering that remains in the departure of balance.

I have always found my feet beneath me before and I know that to be true now. It’s curious how easy it is to care less well for oneself, how much more important other things become. But I remember telling you that no one has it all together, and perhaps that’s true. The tradeoff we accept for such abundance in life is that we’ll never be able to carry it all at the same time.