You can tell all the lies you want, pretend it never happened and try to live a normal life, but in the end you lost something you can’t replace nor get back, so sometimes okay isn’t an option.

Every step seems like the last one my body will allow me to take, even though my door can’t be more than a few feet from the furthest point of this cramped apartment. From end to end it’s a simple box with walls to create more boxes, and all of them are small and have doors and windows and fancy, recessed lighting, so they are definitely not prison cells. I am not trapped, but I can’t seem to move. I glide between a fridge that’s empty to a bathroom that smells like bleach, meandering my way back to that galaxy of a mattress draped in clean smelling sheets and kept cool by a nearby box fan. I collapse into that sea of softness and can’t hold back a sigh. I rotate my neck over my pillow, stretch out my arms and legs and hear my back give a loud ‘crack’, reminding me just how much my body hates me. With exhaustion this deep sleep should be an easy task. But the hours slip by, and I’ve visited the fridge 4 times, and my bathroom remains spotless, and my laundry is all washed and dried and hanging in neat rows, and my bag has been packed and repacked between my backpack, shoulder bag and sling bag because I’m awful at making decisions, which should be obvious by my aversion to my shirtless reflection; the marks a very clear sign of bad decisions made in poor lighting…