All I feel is fatigue. And every morning I wake up tired, I am terrified. Because I see his shadows in the blinds, in the glare off the mirror, the space between the lines of the work I am supposed to do but do not. I feel his fog burrowing into the folds of my mind, calcifying, spreading, eating away at the fibers in my back. I lay enveloped in his familiar scent on the pillow I had only just washed. I wash it again. And in the mornings, he cradles my face in his hands and pulls me back. Escape in to me, he says. I force my eyes open and his figure is only smoke. I tell myself that he is not back. It’s all in my head. Of course it is. I put on earrings so large it hurts to lay down. I tell my body to do what it is supposed to. This is not the time for this. He is not back. Maybe he never left.

I am cold and dead inside. But at least I am clever. And at last I’m starting to actually understand finance. Though the counter to that is maybe realizing that what I’m doing now isn’t what I want to continue to be doing. But that’s something to tackle after the test. I’ve been making progress on studying, and apparently being able to focus for an entire Saturday and get through half a book is not a normal occurrence according to my other analysts. I’ve noticed that whenever I’m in the office, I’m always inordinately hungry. Constantly. And yet when I’m at home, I sometimes don’t even begin to feel the hunger until after lunch. I can’t figure out why. It’s because food is free there and you little bundle of anxiety can’t help but stress eat.

I’ve been on a musicals kick, likely due to Glee being my background show of choice for the past week or so. And after my test, I’m going to go see all of them. This is a sad goddamn song. But this is not a sad post. This is a post about things coming together. About appreciating these few days where somehow everything is working out. Because I know that at some point something will unravel, but I also know that when it happens, it won’t break me. It’s about raising a glass to the person that I am now. Because I wake up early and look in the mirror and like what I see. I love that I’m killing it at work. I love that I’m not procrastinating (as much). I love that sometimes I can manage to run two miles without stopping. Love those qualifiers there. I love that I seem to have found myself and some kind of balance in life. And I love that at around 11:30pm on a Wednesday night, the part of the upper west side that cradles the edge of central park is empty and quiet. It’s so quiet I can hear him whispering things to make me laugh. I hear the rhythm in the clack of the boots I debated for half an hour whether or not to wear. I hear the buzz of every streetlight we pass. And when he puts my arm around me the city is not a city. I drink in the quiet and forget everything else.

The summer before third grade, my parents enrolled me in some math camp where I learned long division and decimals. When the school year started, the teacher gave us a test, in which one of the questions was long division and asked us to find the remainder. Of course young me was determined to be the first one to finish the test. And when I looked at this question, I kept dividing until I was 10 decimals deep. And then I had no idea what to do. I got the question wrong. Apparently it was a lot easier than I thought it was. I wonder now if this is what’s happening when I think about life.

eat, breathe, cfa. That’s life now, besides the obligatory work hours. And surprise surprise I’m writing again. Because as usual, I can’t help but procrastinate. At least it’s somewhat productive this time. After getting that new phone, I downloaded the app for this and realized that they have analytics. And the numbers were higher than I thought they would be. I’m simultaneously concerned and flattered. Because I didn’t think people would really be able to find this. And because I didn’t really think anyone would care to check, even the people that I shared it with. I wonder what they all think of me. Is this all really what I think of me?

So it seems that I’ll be doing this every week instead of every day. Which makes sense, given I don’t have as much to write about when life is mostly work and studying. More like attempting to start studying. The more grounded I am, the more I move towards prose rather than poetry. My words are selected with less care, because when I am not utterly unhinged, they carry significantly less weight. And having a schedule, going to the office, being around people and not confined to the corners of my own mind, I feel more grounded and extraordinarily plain. The strange thing about not having the constant drone of a TV show I’ve already watched playing in the background of every waking (and sometimes even sleeping) moment is that I’ve started to talk to myself. When Soot was here, he was telling me about how not everyone has an internal voice. Now it appears I have two.

The gaps in writing grow wider and my thoughts become tamer. I drift slowly away from the warped poeticism I toiled through a month and a half ago. This new construction of mine is far more ordinary. The stability I once desperately prayed for built itself up in a corner of my mind that I never check. It captured the basics of living. It cut out the gory intrusions. And when at night I no longer feared the seconds of quiet darkness before sleep, I found the edge and crawled into the mind of another.

In elementary school, my erasers never lasted very long. I don’t remember what I would do with them. I don’t think I would ever just leave them on the desk or lend them out and just never get them back. But they would kind of just disappear after a day or two when I stopped caring, because once the edges rounded out I didn’t like to use them anymore. They wouldn’t be able to get the edge of the T without taking out the letters before it too. They couldn’t just fix a word, they’d have to change the entire sentence. The few times I would try to sharpen out a point, I’d be left with a pile of little grey flakes and very little eraser because it was never just quite right. And the little flakes would sit on this blank sheet of paper, and whenever I’d brush them into the trash, a voice in my head would whisper that I didn’t get them all. That one is stuck to my palm, one is on the floor, one is somewhere that I will never find. That in some way, one has managed to erase itself too.

It’s easier to think about my brain as a separate entity. She is mysterious and volatile and brilliant and flawed. She needs to be managed, and also freed. I feel around her folds to try and find what makes her happy, what she wants. And often I find my hands empty, my fingers tainted with feelings and thoughts that I cannot control or understand. They taste like ink, and I do not have a pen. I smear her colors over the door, the mirror, the window. I drop her into a candle flame and look for answers in the smoke. She has adapted to years of never wanting, never needing, and now in this mess of reality she has no direction. I offer up new hobbies, new people, new things and she is capable of being fascinated. But inevitably, she retreats into a corner of comfort, a sedative to defend from knowing that she cannot have everything she wants, and she wants the world.

There is something uncomfortable about trying to build a life. Uncertainty has a smell but this, this discomfort, has a feel. It is sticky and gelatinous and seeps through your pores like sweat until you are afraid to touch anything and afraid to move. It spills into every moment you have, every decision you make, every thought that pops into your head. It is everywhere and I am afraid. Because one day it might harden and trap me inside a shell of everything I cannot be that I cannot escape.

I have very little to tell you about today. I was home, did a crossword, started painting, watched TV, and listened to music. There are no thoughts in my head. And it is wonderful. I am not panicked. I am not sad. I am just existing. Which is how I imagine most other people go through their lives. As promised, Monday date was cancelled. And I don’t remember any dreams I had this morning. And as I’m writing this, I’m wondering at what point I’m going to start spiraling again. But for now, I’m going to enjoy my empty mind.