I feel like My dreams weren’t that substantial last night, but they were there.

Something in me feels like I should check on my former father in-law – and I suppose it is about time that I call my ex as well.

I’m not sure if I remember them well enough to deserve a quotation, but usually when I start, I get on a roll.

I was riding a bike, in a variety of places. I believe I lived in the place that I currently do (I wonder how much of this place is going to be lodged in my memory). It was a nice day, and I came out of my driveway and I believe I turned right.

I actually have never done this, I should.

The road was dirt, and I recognize it from my memory now as a mix between the road to my ex’s house from the main road and the view of the second road I have to take when going to my childhood home from the main road.

It was strange – I could remember the view from over the handle bars, the speed at which things were going, the perspective of how high I would be on a bike, turning and looking at people next to me, glancing down and seeing my feet on the peddles, even brief bits of fatigue in the muscles that one would use for peddling. Or I imagine so, as I don’t really know how to ride a bike.

My ex is still lucky enough to live in his childhood home. Come to think of it, so is my boyfriend. I’m so jealous my stomach boils, and my heart catches fire when I see how they take that for granted. Then there is the slow freeze of guilt as I realize that there was a time that I did too. Then just a dull dragging ache up from the bottom of my ribcage and up into my jaw, clawing it’s way slowly behind my face, until it leaks out of my eyes as the most minimal lukewarm tears. I feel my ribs collapse, barely any tears but apparently I was fighting really hard to hold them in for so long that the release is a more foreign feeling than the restraint.

What does one call this feeling, in shorthand? Bitterness? Resentment? Whatever it is, it makes it impossible to relax my jaw fully, and for some reason I can clearly remember relaxing my jaw back when I knew I could always go home.

Now what do I do? What will I do when things get really bad, if I got really hurt, if I got arrested, if I died, if my brother died, if my parents get sick, if my house burns down, again, if I get cancer again if the world ends if there’s riots if I need to hide?

No one cares enough about me to care what would happen to me.

I wonder why I worry about my parents so much. To be honest. They obviously don’t worry enough about me. Here I am bending all hell space and time to make sure that I can drive my parents to their surgeries in the midst of a motherfucking plague, while my amazing little brother pours every cent he has into a house big enough for them to feel safe in just so that together we can try and replace the life they didn’t care that they were taking from us just as long as they were taking it from each other.

I don’t know why I still get so scared that my Father might go blind, or my Mother might choke on her own short circuiting nerves. There’s nothing I can do.

Deep breath. Is that why I’m angry? I do hate feeling helpless.

I feel like god told me (yes, whatever) that I had to quit smoking in order to save my father’s sight. I could, but I can’t. I know magical thinking is not a very good coping mechanism, but I encourage anyone who ever scrolls across this page to show me a better one beyond just giving the fuck up and saying something idiotic like “just wait and see” or something else that makes me have to fight a full body impulse to somehow get their teeth into the back of their throat, be it by fist, foot, or baseball bat.

The boy and I took a drive by his childhood home one weekend.

There’s someone else living there now.