I didn’t know I always needed to be the center of attention, the way the center of a circle doesn’t know it needs the circle in order to be a center. I realized this tonight after asking myself why it is I’m always so attracted to fashion model types, and an insight came down the runway of my intuition and whispered in my ear in slow motion that I’ve wanted to be in the spotlight I’ve been behaving like pretty much all my life. But now that I know this about myself, I think I’d like to try not needing to be the only one in focus more often, though I’m not sure I know how to do that, or even that I can know.

This is usually where the teacher shows up and flips you into the next page of your journey, I tell myself, but since I don’t have a teacher right now to dogear my ego for me, and probably shouldn’t have one, considering I’m trying to let go of this need for attention I’ve been talking about, allow me to retreat behind the waterfall safety of simile when I say I imagine not obsessing about wanting to be the center of the universe would be a lot like waking up in the morning and making someone other than myself a cup of coffee first, which, if I’m being honest, reminds me of the last time I saw my grandmother, unconscious and hooked up to a breathing machine during her final hours.

Hovering over that memory now, I can see myself sitting beside her again, trying, mostly because of the incessant promptings of my ex, to find the words to say to her unresponsive body, how sorry I was for not being there as much as I could have been, and that I wish we’d had more time, when in truth, and because I need to center myself just now, it was her time I was worried about not having any more of.