There is a kind of restlessness I keep feeding in the dark even when it refuses to name what it needs,
There is a kind of restlessness I have been carrying so long that I have started to mistake its weight to form my own natural shape,
There is a kind of restlessness that shows up dressed in every word for ambition and drive and calling,
There is a kind of restlessness, did I inherit it from some version of my life I never consciously agreed to live,
There is a kind of restlessness that has quietly eaten through the floor of everything where I thought I was standing on securely...
There is something I keep reaching for even on the days when reaching costs me the very steadiness I need to reach at all,
There is something I have attached my whole sense of future safety to and I do not think I realized I was doing it until the attachment was already too much like a load-bearing,
There is something I have told myself I want when the truer and more uncomfortable thing is that I am afraid of who I would be without the wanting to organize my world around it,
When did I stop being the one who chose the dream and become the one the dream was quietly choosing and rearranging without my permission,
There is something I keep reaching for that has become less about having it and more about not having to face what is underneath the dream...
There is a version of this wanting that I have been calling it true dedication when what I should be calling it is a leash I tied around my own neck with my own careful hands,
There is a version of this wanting that makes me tight with fear, the moment anything threatens to take it, I have let it become the whole thing I am protecting instead of just one part,
There is a version of this wanting that has cost me peace and clarity and whole seasons of being actually present in the life that was already here while I rehearsed the arrival of the life I believed would finally satisfy me,
Can I honestly tell the difference between the desire that is building me and the desire that is slowly replacing me with something more fragile and more desperate,
There is a version of this wanting that will never be satisfied by getting the outcome because the wanting was never really about the outcome at all…
There is a grip I have not been willing to open because opening it even slightly feels like the same thing as letting the whole dream fall and shatter on the ground below,
There is a pressure that has shaped the way I move through everything I touch, turning even ordinary moments into something that feels like a test of whether they matter enough,
There is a grip that I have convinced myself is the same thing as care and commitment, when, if I am being brutally honest, it is mostly a refusal to tolerate any uncertainty about how this ends,
What would I actually feel in my body, on the day this finally slipped out of my hands, that no matter how tightly I had held on and refused to let the loss come,
There is a grip so old and so practiced that I have almost forgotten there was ever a version of me who held things with open palms and did not lose herself when the rest moved on...
Watchwords:
The hunger was not mine from the beginning,
I confused the leash with dedication,
Reaching until the cost was the steadiness,
A grip so old I forgot open palms,
The wanting replaced me while I rehearsed arrival...
Here is Tikatarot, who dares you to answer the question, “Who am I?”..
As and will always be reminding you to dream:
