This is what I see.

Low morning light creeping under the curtains to crawl across my floor, staining the throw rug blue.

C woke me up, running her hand over my right knee and thigh. Smooth and gentle. I laid there, enjoying the feeling, then shifted away.

My phone keeps flashing red at me, texts and emails coming throughout the night, I check it periodically, waiting for that one. That one that'll give me a little hit of validation. Maybe that one that will change my life.

At 530, C escapes from the bed, crawling over me, puts on her sneakers and goes for her morning jog. I listen to her undo the locks on my front door and, for the next hour I'm alone, listening to the sounds of my own heart trapped beneath the sheets.

She comes back and gets in my shower, stepping on the sheepskin rugs in front of my vanity. The knobs are turned in the shower, the spray full blast, water bouncing off the floor of the tub. It's rare for me to have someone in my shower and not be in there with them.

I dress while she sits on the edge of the bed, texting. I put on my shoes, sitting next to her, and we talk. I lean over, my head on her shoulder. Brief contact.

I forget things.

I forget what I write here.
I forget the things I tell myself to remember.
Nervous ticks, the reasons I behave the way I behave.
Defense mechanisms built up over time, ones that so few people ever realize I engage in.

So I make notes to myself, on here. Hoping that, somewhere down the line, I'll go back through them and remember where I was, who I was. That I won't keep living in this constant state of "not good enough". My own version of it. Not good enough by my own standards.

But each time I look back, I think that it was all nothing. It was all easy. The natural progression of things.

I look back on pain, and I shrug. I got through it, it wasn't that bad. Even if I was in a ball on the floor, sobbing my eyes out. Even if I was in a hospital bed after having a life vaccuumed away, near hyperventilating. Even if I placed myself between my parents for my mother's own physical well-being. Even if I had to give up everything that I was working for, the supposed path to my dreams, so I could be there for her. For them.

I don't feel stronger. I don't feel more self confident, though I know I am, as actions I would not engage in just a year ago, I engage in now.

My friends, they look at me as this sort of wild, roaming, intelligent beast. Sexual and independent, insightful. Constantly exploring, constantly pushing boundaries of normalcy.

I don't see myself as such.

And maybe I won't. Not ever.

There are things that I should do. There are paths I need to follow. I keep trying. I repeat myself so often, with these loftly goals of mine.

I know I am better than this.
I know I can do better than this.

And I feel like a tool for saying that to myself so often, but never stepping up as fully as I should.