EXISTENTIAL DREAD

I wake up most days wanting to evacuate my own life. Not dramatically. Just enough to breathe elsewhere.

Sometimes I think I should have chosen photography. Then my house would be full of frames. Happy people. Lovers mid-laugh. Children suspended in milestones. Careers frozen at their most convincing angles.

Maybe then my mornings would feel like an archive, a careful curation of proof that something worked.

Maybe I would walk past the walls and borrow their certainty. Touch happiness the way you touch vapour— knowing it is not yours, but grateful it lingers on your skin.

Instead, my rooms are undecided. My furniture waits for a version of me that did not arrive. The silence is not empty, it is poorly furnished.

I move through my days with the awkwardness of someone who missed a cue and stayed on stage too long. Not tragic. Just off-beat. Unmarriageable in the way spaces are when they do not know what they are for.

Sometimes I imagine escape as something ordinary. A train. A road. A different morning.

But even my longing feels provisional, like a life I might have had if I had decided earlier, or braver, or at all.

So, I live here instead, touching what I could not have as if it were mist, convincing myself that proximity counts as possession.