Sometimes it scares me, my ability to be okay. The way I can move forward so easily after so much has gone wrong makes life feel temporary, transient. I sometimes wonder if anything will truly stop me in my tracks, hold me in my place, keep me there, steady me. Maybe that thing will be a person, someone I love or will come to love, and they will love me too and it will be forever. Some part of me hopes for that. Some part of me hopes that there is something out there that is worth holding onto more than my own sanity. I want to be hurt, maybe, just so it feels like something can really tear me apart.

I remember I was hurt once, by a boy, and I thought, this, this is it. This is the moment I fall apart. This is the moment I will never be able to come back from, something that will change me, harden me, make me someone new. This is something I will never get over. But I woke up one morning, and he was gone, gone from my mind and from my soul as if in some way he had never been there at all and I thought to myself, what is wrong with me? How am I okay? How did someone that once felt like a pillar of my existence become so irrelevant so quickly?

Transient. A word that sticks with me wherever I go. A word that I read once and thought, that is exactly how I feel, even though it is not quite a feeling. I think of everything I hold onto that forms my world and how all of those things have shifted and morphed and become something else entirely as I have moved through my life. Maybe the only stable thing is transience, growth, and change.

So, maybe, the only truly everlasting thing is myself. And the only thing I can count on when I fall asleep at night is that I will be there in the morning and even if the world is shifting and falling apart around me I will be okay. Because when things change, I change. I become stronger. I become better. I become braver. It is me who survives the fire when everything around me turns to ash. The world is ephemeral, temporary, transient, but somehow, I am not.

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