Image by Luis del Rio

It’s weird.

All of it’s weird.

There isn’t a specific pinpoint for the peculiarity of this new stage in my life.

I could be poetic in my description, however, only one phrase best sums all the my emotions and sensations I feel inside of me.

And that is, “What the actual fuck?”

Extra, extra emphasis on the word “fuck”.

I moved out of the only home I ever really knew and took a one-way train ride to the one and only buckeye state. Most of the things in my possession are already destroyed by the trash compactor because I had to throw out almost everything I had. There were journals, books, clothes even, and it still had to be removed from my life. And in addtion to cleaning out my entire dorm room, setting up my new phone with service that I now pay for, booking an Air Bnb for a week while I figured out a longer-term housing situation, and filling out electronic paperwork for leaving my university permanently, everything was preparing me for leaving Delaware, my childhood home as well as prison, behind.

Forever.

I spent most of my short twenty-one year life living from bedroom to bedroom. The one bedroom I spent the years of my early childhood to my late teen years is seared into my head like a hot iron emitting pulsing gas while stuck into cooling water. The four walls covered in paintings picked by my parents, banners with my deadname drawn in the style of Philadephia Zoo artists from when I was child posted above my bedroom door and ontop of my windows to the outside world. Back then, my neighborhood was the whole world to me. Walking around the many streets, with varying houses and townhouses, listening to birds who sung their hearts out in joy of their freedom, it was all I really knew. It took many years before I was allowed to walk outside, and then all over the neighborhood. It never made sense to me until I was older why I never received a key to the house, which was that my father never wanted me to have true autonomy over myself and my life. So for the time I was naive, I relished whatever little liberation I received. Those walks were little sneak peaks into a life I dreamt in secret of having, one where I went wherever I wanted without needing anyone’s permission, made new friends, experienced rad as hell adventures, and fell in love with wonderful people, hoping one of them was my soulmate. I was sincerely envisioning for a one-and-done type of deal. Whenever I came back to the house, the deepest parts of my subconscious knew I was officially back in the cage again, never knowing when I would taste the exhiliration of liberation once more.

That was my life for twenty years. And I thought it would stay like that for the rest of my life, a sanity-searing cycle of broken promises, violent codependence, and brief, rare moments of the freedom I so long craved. It was all my body knew how to live on. It was what I was conditioned to experience.

A nightmare will never be enought to describe it, but it was a nightmare, a nightmare I slowly began waking up from.

I wasn’t ready, no way in hell for sure. But it was happening, and I realized soon enough I needed to get ready.

It was time for me to break out of my own tower. The motivation?

The tower was crumbling ontop of me.