It feels really good to be around people who know nothing of my illness- to just be a random chatty stranger with an adorable dog, traipsing the world with a smile scowl or smirk depending on my mood. I am not an ill person to be pitied nor the brave warrior who overcame it all- the entire sliding scale between those binaries is cruel. I just am. Scars remain mysterious and not reminders of the harm done to my body. Oversharing is a mere quirk and not an annoyance- the sliding scales feel less sharp here. I move through the places I visit in disguises of a functional human and the woman who makes the bed but only in the room that is not hers. The person who has enough clean underwear for the journey, but pile of hoarder-smelling pants and socks etc piled in a second bedroom an entire space paid for to hold the consequences of impulse shopping. No half filled journals, no longing for meaning, no worries mate. Depositing little images of myself as I want to be into the corners of the world.

Last night the moon woke me up rising over the water. It was almost daylight level brightness, just a cloudy or murky daylight. It reflected on the ocean in the long glittering shaft of light that remained in the same place despite the shifting water – the light has no time for waves, the tide, or splashing fish munching on the water surface bugs. It just is. It’s just there, creating an impossible pathway out of my tent across the water to where the coyotes are howling at the rising rock in the sky, reflecting back the beams of the sun. Here, the moon and I can be our best reflections and refractions of the suns light. We can see the road ahead of us, but we already know we are prepared and we have enough clean underwear, at least for this trip. It is not a fantasy, these ideal versions – we know it’s not, because we have deposited little and big images of ourselves throughout our worlds. The moon imposing and impossible and lighting a pathway taken only by the reflected and refracted light of the burning sun – the cold stoic moon imagining the pathways that exist only for itself and me, ignoring the trivial matters such as fish and hoarder-smelling pants and socks etc.