I hugged the bubbles in my bath for the first time in 12 years

My skin is pink to the touch due to the scorching water

If you were to ask me a few months ago, I would have said “a year of my life was robbed from me”

As it was to most others as well

My seventeenth year in this realm was spent cooped up in my ~ never to be spoken about by tourists ~ Montclare home

The bath is more cramped up than I remember

And I have beads of sweat that form above my top lip now

New scars and bruises beneath and on top of my delicate lace of skin

I am to be a woman in less than a month

And yet, I feel as though I am slowly regressing in hopes of bringing my childhood back to me

Blowing on fresh dandelions,

Listening to the birds chirp in the April wind

Tin Can was so long ago

So special

Monumental

Eighteen is supposed to be so monumental

It’s bittersweet

I’m sobbing one minute and holding my stuffed animal named Cheddar who I got when I was four the next

Maybe regressing was a bad idea

It’s all a blur, a strange blur

Every moment I try to remember

I call them dreams

Or memories that I confuse as dreams

Or dreams that I confuse as memories

It’s hard to distinguish between the two

It’s hard to remember

Sometimes I get fuzzy and I can’t get out of that fuzz

Sometimes when I’m really, really happy,

It feels like a dream

When I’m with the ones I love, when I laugh so much I cry

Or my tummy hurts

It feels like a dream

I can’t seem to find an answer to why

What’s real supposed to feel like?

What’s the good reality supposed to feel like?

I’m not sure I know

I’m not sure I’ll ever know

But at the end of the day, when I lay in bed,

I replay every single moment