My laugh echoes all over the room like a rubber pancake, bouncing amid empty hangers in a closet that is lop-sided between gone and still here. My throat gets away from me like an earthworm in a light socket and I have to reel it back in. It gurgles, squelched. My burgundy blood-hot heart surfaces on a persistent buoyance of thick, slow joy that I trust to rise up and float me and never put me down.
This is Day Zero, the transition space between one universe and another, one reality and another, one me and another. I feel so different now. This is the point of no return, that split-second startling that jolts the marrow when the mirror flips and, instead of a complete face in its harmless, candy-coated entirety, I suddenly confront a landscape of individual pores, each one a gaping volcano leading into fathomless original darkness.
The flip. That's this moment. You explore so much more deeply and slowly when you must climb into and out of every pore of life. It takes time, scrumptious time, and the flavors radiate through your desperately clenched jaw... beautiful agony when you are free to be how you are and live at your own speed...
I will never again look at my life and see a Sisyphean metaphor. I will no longer feel compelled to do 12,000 things at once in order to maximize a tiny sliver of free time. All of my time belongs to me, and when I drink green tea, I drink green tea. That is all.
--Salyha, North Pole, Alaska
