There’s a tightness in my chest. It’s not the virus (I hope) but more likely a cocktail of anxiety and allergies emerging as the weather shifts again. I spend my days drawing out the skeleton for the week. I fill the pages with golden eggs that seem to be popping out of me like a broken gumball machine.

The heartache of my early twenties taught me that my coping mechanism is to drown myself in work. It’s not a denial of emotions but a denial of their power. If I can keep my fingertips moving and creating maybe I won’t feel at every moment I am breathing. Maybe I won’t feel the intense claustrophobia where the walls are my country’s borders. Maybe I won’t feel the heaviness of my parents’ questions of what to do now that their sandcastles are being washed away. Maybe I won’t feel the impending hyperventilation that accompanies the need for more protests. Maybe I won’t feel the tightness in my chest.

I’m hanging on to this space in between, trying to stretch it out like proofed dough so that I can make more. There needs to be enough so that I am full for days, so that I am fulfilled for hours, so that I am satiated for just a bit longer. So that I am in control.

This space in between where there is no time, no goals, and no pants.
This space in between where screens are just another window with lifeforms on the other side. Can you see me?
This space in between a governmental’s collapse and its reincarnation.
This space in between my deodorant and the whiff of a stranger’s cologne.
This space in between every inhale and exhale.

In this space in between, I watch Tim Burton films and let the Danny Elfman scores coat my consciousness. Misfits shrouded in a gothic palette existing in whimsical settings that don’t know how to hold them. I have felt detached from the ground, from the fight, from the belief that there still is one. I’m an observer in a glass sphere rolling over the streets. What weight keeps me here? Is the place out there still mine? Or am I trapped in the space in between? Is this where I’ve been all along?

Until I figure out the answers, I’ll sit here gazing through the looking glass.