it's in the air.

As a Taurus, it's in my nature to stand at an impasse with my arms folded and bottom lip out refusing to budge. I am completely resistant to change. I am the champion of the way things were.

Even when I left my old terrible job, I felt guilty somehow that I was letting them down for leaving and thought about changing my mind. Just to keep things the same.

I moved to a new neighborhood. It's a very nice neighborhood and I like living on the Hill in its own right, but the 42 bus doesn't go here. I used to live and die by the 42 bus. The orange and blue lines are somehow not as successful a lifeline. The 42 always took me to happy places with butterflies in my stomach. Now I long for those days before the butterflies turned to wasps.

I complained about my stompy upstairs neighbor. I bemoaned her awfulness to everyone and anyone. But now that things are too quiet for me to bear, I sort of wish for her squeaky, thunderous warning signals that someone else was here, living and breathing right above me, so I wasn't completely alone. Just quiet in my own little box of an apartment and she (less quiet) in hers.

I miss the whizzing mechanical hum of stability. Right now everything could change, and I don't know how else to kick and scream and say NO. I am fighting for last week, last month, last year. If I could frame my pace before any missteps I would. I saved pieces of paper documenting what last felt normal. People can't leave. People can't give up. People can't die. People can't change. That much. Time is so short yet so slow. How do people reconcile?

Because I can't. I can't even deal with how I rearranged my refrigerator for Christ's sake. I've been growing out this damned pixie cut for months and I'm sort of grateful you can't really tell.

But all around me it's looming large. Faces are in my head of people who are gone, and people who might be next. People who are shrugging their shoulders and threatening to go, and people whose shoulders are bent from hanging on.

And I'm just sort of here, with my arms folded waiting for the hubbub to die down before I try and put things back where they belong. Asking me to change against my will is difficult. I never go down without a fight. It's in my nature to ride out storms with my chest puffed out for what I want.

The trouble is other people. And what they want.