Is it natural to think so much? For questions only lead to questions. An answer feels only as an opening to more questions. Not a spiral. It is as if the room around me revolves but it is I that is orbiting. I look up at the floor as I stand on the ceiling.

I think back to the grass during lunchtimes at St. Anne's. That half-green hay that we enjoyed our youth on. A patchwork of dry and tame earth that the boys would kick a football across. I hear the shouts in the branches of the trees and watch the gaze of the girls from the shade. I’d often wish it were on me. The way earth crumbled in my hands. I long graduated that school now.

It was a 9 minute walk to my childhood home. I felt a preposterous pride, first tasked with walking myself to school in Year 3. My walk began around 8.35am from our front door. It still has the patterned glass, shaped in some sort of fish and some sort of leaf. No one to guide my steps out the door as my parents have already left for work. I remember saying bye to the hydrangea bush in the corner of our front yard as my anchor and taking the first breaths of the world’s morning air.

I smiled a lot then, as goofy as I was.

It was straight, down the road. In time for assembly at 8.45am. It was trust I did not earn but fully owned.

As I gained age - trust had to be earned. Colder felt the world and the patches between green and brown more defined. It is interesting to feel. It is the pain that we learn to be aware of.

Trust needs earning now. I talk less. I fear looking silly yet wish to be seen.

It chases me. I hunch over the seat. The seams bleed foam from the leather. Black. Like the tobacco-stained shelf above my head. Like the silhouette of Mina, my bar’s Mama.

She gave me kisses. I scrunch the foil of my chocolate bar and in it I hear the ocean. It is a Thursday. A good day to be a fish. Or perhaps a mermaid. Gowned in scales the colour of the bubbles I used to blow in the playground. My desires exist in the same spirit. Iridescent & fleeting.

Short-lived and surprising when it fails to pop but pop they must as to keep me here. Trapped with my being and slightly funny face.

Present only with the second I contend with, and I am happy here. Probably because I’m inside and it’s cold out. The mist is my calling. Mist of the slowest rain. As if the rain falls up from the ground and the stems of those hydrangeas carry dew upwards.

The anguish of the day to come is happy right now. I will miss this when I can no longer miss.