Sometimes I feel as if I’m taking a walk outside of my skin. I peel back layers of flesh and muscle and nerves and tendons, I release my bones to let them breathe. Sometimes I feel like such a stranger, here, in a body that doesn’t belong to me, in a body that I’m borrowing.

In the last few weeks I’ve woken up in the middle of the night with heat pouring out of me, my scalp slicked with sweat, as if my soul has been running and I’m awaking just as it’s returning to lie down again. I have felt restless and unsatisfied, imagining several different and incomplete iterations of myself, in which I am a writer or a yogi or an artist or a freelancer. 

Sometimes I just want to shed this body and leave it behind, to live momentarily unbounded and free, and to pick it back up again like an old hobby. I just want to spend a few hours feeling like myself again, to not feel all of the obligations and responsibilities that weigh on this body, the alarms and the deadlines that mark its days, the meetings and the gatherings that necessitate its presence. I want to no longer feel like a captive in this skin, a prisoner to its schedule. 

I want to crawl out of this life and into another, and spend a few precious moments beholden to nothing, nothing at all, but myself.