It's just. Things. Emotions. Feelings. Goodbyes. Watching possibilities pass in front of you like ghosts of another life, another reality that exists out there somewhere. It's suddenly having what was probably an anxiety attack in the middle of the dinner you're having with your mom in a mexican restaurant that's really loud and noisy and having to excuse yourself out to the car when that sliver of control isn't going to be enough to keep yourself together. Trying to hold yourself in one piece through several major life changes happening at once (and feeling like you're failing). Working to curb that severe anxiety that comes around every time the year-mark passes with a new friendship and trying to not react and overreact to even the tiniest whiff of change or the most loudly apparent ones because you don't know what's really a big deal and what really isn't because everything is a big deal right now in every moment.

It's closing the previous act and waiting behind the curtain for the next one to start, except you don't know your lines, your fellow actors and actresses may or may not be coming with you into the next segment of the story, the scenery and sets are being wheeled off and changed, and you're dressed in something new but maybe a little more you.

It's a lot. A lot of things, a lot of words, a lot of people.

And maybe, for once, a lot of reward for patiently waiting for so many years.