Measures

The train slows as it nears the city, rolling quietly past the little lake where you swam as a child. How impossibly wide it seemed, then. At the station, smiling faces you've never not known, and you stroll together through a town that on the surface seems to be changing, but which underneath is exactly, irrevocably the same. 

The water is beautiful, the trees, the air, throngs on bicycles already brown with the season but your insides itch and you've nowhere safe to turn. Bike along the old railway, a thousand times you've passed that soccer field, a thousand times you've braced yourself for that hill, you could do this in your sleep and maybe that's just it. 

Everything sounds the same, everything looks the same, you love the way you feel in their arms but it could never last. You go to bed in a room that's dark and quiet, pass out before your head hits the pillow. The next day comes quickly.

You're ready to be awake.