Art by Angela Bella Morte
There's a sky that existed before any of this. Before the headlines, before the machines outside my window started tearing into the earth at six in the morning like the ground owed somebody a debt it never agreed to. The stars up there don't know what year it is down here. They just keep burning, patient, indifferent, waiting for eyes that still know how to look up.
I've been looking up a lot lately. Down here it's been hard to breathe.
Somewhere in the last few months my life started to feel like a cage with a time clock bolted to it. I go in, I do what's asked, I do it well, and I come home smaller than I left. There's a version of a job that's supposed to be a place you build something. Mine has started to feel like a sentence I'm serving, and I keep waiting for the part where they tell me what I did to deserve it.
The cage wasn't the only thing asking more of me than I had. I'm always the one who holds things together while everyone else gets to come apart, so when something in my life cracked without warning, I did what I always do. I sat somewhere built out of fluorescent light, waiting, bargaining with a sky I couldn't even see through.
I'm trying to build something of my own in the middle of all this, something nobody assigned me and nobody can take a cut of. But I come home from the cage and all my body wants is sleep. I've been trying to put down the thing I used to reach for once a week to quiet my own mind, and some nights the quiet I actually want just isn't available any other way yet. I'm working on that. I'm not pretending I've already overcome it.
Something small and beautiful left my life in March. I still feel the shape of it some mornings, in the space where it used to be. What's left, I've turned into a small kind of devotion: making sure the world I can control is soft and warm and safe. If I can't quiet the machinery grinding through the ground outside, or the chaos on every screen, I can at least quiet this. I can make sure something small and trusting has a good life because I am in it.
I finally asked for help with the weight I'd stopped calling a hard season and started calling something else. There's relief waiting in an old coping mechanism yet some part of me is afraid of who I'll be on the other side of it. I know that's not where I want to be.
Everywhere I look the world seems to be arguing with itself, loud and merciless, like every devil that ever existed decided to show up at once. All I want is out. Not gone, just out. Out from under the parts of my life that were never actually mine to carry. Freedom from being the rescuer, the rock, the one who doesn't get to fall apart because everyone else already did. I want peace I didn't have to fight the whole world for.
So I keep looking up. Because nature doesn't perform for anyone and it's still the most beautiful thing I know. The trees swaying in a patch of sun. A bird crossing a sky that doesn't care about quarterly earnings or headlines or waiting rooms. That sky was here before the machinery started digging, and it'll be here after. I just want to stand under it and remember I'm allowed to be a person the sky belongs to too, not just something that keeps the ground running.
x Angela Bella Morte x
