there's this myth we expel a little of our soul as we breathe. so the people we spend the most of our time around slowly exchange more and more of their soul with ours.

there's proof, too. it's in out transferred mannerisms, inside jokes, subtle preferences, opinions that are shaped by conversations. how we go about our day, like who we want to talk to first thing in the morning, if we clean our desks all at once or over time, how we view others and their hobbies. everything we know is a reflection of our memories and experiences and the people around us.

i believe i'm the person i am today because of everyone around me, and their soul. my parents, friends, even fictional characters. cheesy? perhaps. true? yes. we're influenced by art and social expectations and ideas and ambition.

but, most importantly, we become who we are because of the people around us.

and my soul is only mine as much as it is theirs.

I don’t remember much of high school. The childhood summer mansion where we played out our fantasies for the future: this was where my life started, ended, and currently resides in a daydream.

What is the present moment, in what was our high school experience? I struggle for it. Is it the moment we die a million little deaths at the hands of our little minds? Are we constantly fighting internal battles that, if they don’t kill you, will cause so much damage as to render you useless?

I ask because high school was a battleground, a war against ourselves we didn’t survive.

I don’t think I ever apologized to her for it.

The endless doctor’s appointments, the medicine scripts, the forms that asked, on a scale of one to five, how much I wanted to die: this was all separate from her and her experience of high school. And yet there I was, in my hospital gown, and I will always be in and out of the institutions that push us further apart.

In there somewhere, in my swirling disaster of a brain, is hope that our relationship can be the future we had dreamed of.

I want her in it. I want a sister, and above all, a warrior to count on in the moments I go under.