compression.

29 july 2026

dear granddaughters,

i opened the notes app and wrote i can’t sleep. then waited.
cursor blinked like a small fire in the dark.

my body felt lit from the inside. not anxious exactly.
more like something had been packed too tightly for too long
and had begun pressing against
the walls of my skin.
something wants out. now.

i kept seeing a road.
north, maybe.

lake and a cabin in a forest.
where the air would be cool enough to take a full breath.
smell the wet earth beneath mother cedar.
campfire crackling in the dark.
no one needing anything from me.
no fluorescent lights.
no small talk.
no news for a bit.
enough quiet so my body can relax.
enough to hear with my heart.

“you just want to run away,” the old voice said.

maybe. but i don’t think this is knee-jerk. not this time.
tiff, you haven’t knee jerked in a few years, remember?

yes, i know. i am aware i gaslight myself.

i have been imagining this for months.
my journal thrown into the passenger seat.
just driving north.

it has become a bit of a rebellion against the idea that happiness exists elsewhere.

something in my chest buzzed.

because i am tired of being told that life is elsewhere. later.
can’t we create lives where we live in the moment?
after i have earned enough or healed enough or figured out how to turn my longing into something useful.

i am over it. it steals our life force and living.

everything in me says all this is wrong.

life support lived on subscriptions and screens.
a cage keeping us consuming while something human in us starves.
i put my hand over my sternum
the hunger pangs for humaning life consume my days lately.

“what do you want?” i whispered.

somewhere along the way women me were sold a lie that our highest achievement after forty would be looking untouched.

i pretend myself bulimic. shoving my finger down my throat.
trying to vomit it out of me.
but there isn’t a toilet big enough.
it’s baked in.
is there time, or a way, to get it out?

i’ve been hearing myself telling myself i’m stuck, again.
maybe because stuck sounds like failure. or an excuse.
like i should have tried harder. made a plan. pushed through.
bypassing the real ground i’m alive one. call it a playing field.
and doing this without a victim mindset because that isn’t helpful.

i can’t listen to music as much.
mostly because it’s too much noise in my body.
i roll the window down.
cool twilight air wafts the word is compression.

everything inside me is pressing toward the moment it breaks open.
i keep trying the words on.
i don’t know what the first creative act is. writing more?
writing and journaling anchor me, yes but i want to step out of
this cage sold as a dream. an american one.
because i don’t believe it anymore.
it’s a lie that extracts all of our life force.
it’s extracted mine.

i dream of a road trip sitting on my 10x10 back porch.
it’s going to be 100 today.
micro dosing hell thought passes through my brain.
i am a winter girlie.
you sound ungrateful.
maybe i know what i like and don’t like and i say it out loud now.

i watch ben mark my wicker chair.

i want a life my body recognizes before i die.

the moon is toward fullness tonight.
the wheel is turning toward lammas on the first.
though nothing in me feels ready to be gathered.

still…i can feel something ripening.

flourish anyway,
gram