turbulence never ends but maybe next month it will

i’ve always found it interesting that i was born in august, a month that feels like the soft ending of something. not quite the beginning of fall, but close enough to smell the change. i was born on the 13th—not a friday, though it feels like it should’ve been. the kind of date people sidestep on calendars, just in case. i came into the world with a heart murmur. they told my mother my heart skipped beats, like it couldn’t fully commit to rhythm. i still feel it sometimes—a flutter, a pause, a sudden awareness that i am alive and flawed and continuing anyway. it made people nervous, doctors mostly. but for me, it was normal. turbulence introduced itself early and stayed. maybe i was born with a little chaos already stitched into me. my father wasn’t around. his absence was louder than any presence could have been. there’s something particular about being a girl with an absent father. you become a searcher. always looking for something to mirror you, complete you, explain you. but nothing ever really does.
the ache just grows quieter, more sophisticated.

my mother married someone later—someone who wasn’t very kind, someone who made me feel so small. and that’s when i started to hate men. he introduced the blueprint. a before-and-after. and after that, i kept finding versions of him in other people. not on purpose. they just arrive. unannounced. familiar.

still, i had a good childhood. i remember laughter. sunlight on carpet. getting sundrunk, little routines that felt holy. but even then i had this itch that there was more. not more things, but more me. somewhere else. waiting.
so i left. ran, really. to new york.

i’ve lived with people who became stories.
a quiet 30-year-old man who never asked anything of me, which felt like both a kindness and an avoidance. a girl who fell in love with me and couldn’t tell if she wanted to hold me or become me. someone i trusted, who turned on me just when i thought i was safe. my life here has been a series of soft betrayals, tiny disappointments, broken mirrors. yet i remain.
maybe because this city reflects the turbulence i was born with.
maybe because i’ve learned how to live among the cracks.

and yet… i keep asking.
why is this a theme?
why does instability follow me like a scent?
when will it leave?

sometimes i think it never does. sometimes i think it isn’t following me—it’s just a part of me. but other times, in moments too quiet to ignore, i feel something else blooming. a softness that didn’t exist before. a clarity.
like maybe, just maybe, i’m not broken. just changing shape.

and my heart, skipping as it does, keeps reminding me: we are still here.

still here.