My parents buy me a new twin mattress when I am too old for my toddler’s bed with the guard rail but too young to remember my actual age, and, growing up eating stale bread when it was what we had, that is the bed I sleep on until the morning I fly across the country to attempt to take up space somewhere else.

My roommates grow up differently than me, less stale bread and divorce, more family vacation photos. They learn different love languages than me - not paying the bills but asking are you okay. Intimacy is a language I have not yet learned, a language taught by soft conversations and gentle hands absently stroking the ends of my hair. Sleep catches me slumped onto their shoulders on the train.

My bed itself remains unshared until the night my partner who is not yet my partner wakes me up to say I had a nightmare, can I sleep with you, and the drowsy-eyed reply, without hesitation, is of course, and my body aches not from the contortions it seems to take to fit another person who I’ve known for just a couple months beside me but from the relief of having a hand to hold in the dark because I still have nightmares too.

They share my bed with something resembling regularity until they can’t because they go home, and so do I - or maybe I don’t, maybe I can’t, since the answer to my asked question will you let me come home and my unasked question do I want to go home keeps changing, my father’s anger rippling and mutating the ground under my feet so I’m never quite sure where I stand. So I sleep in a stranger of a relative’s guest bed until a week later I learn how to walk through earthquakes and fly home.

I sleep in my old twin bed for two nights, realize I’ve missed the familiar purple sheets, but lie on top of the blankets anyway. If I scoot down just a little I can hook my feet over the edge of the mattress, realize there is nothing left for me to grow into. Then all at once the ground solidifies, my questions answered, and I learn the value of living in a small town with many cheap hotels. I cry in the Lyft but not the hotel room, unable to feel anything but an alien relief. There are no cockroaches here.

I do not dream but wake to sunlight slicing across my outstretched arms, realize this is the first time I have been alone. The sheets scratch, but I stretch into the expanse anyway.

Necessity hasn’t changed my socioeconomic status, so the next three weeks form a procession of borrowed instead of bought spaces. I sleep in friends’ guest-rooms-turned-storage-spaces and strangers’ storage-spaces-turned-guest-rooms, among boxed lives and others’ fond childhood memories, all shelved neatly, while I meticulously ensure none of my things stray too far from the confines of my carefully packed duffle bag.

Half asleep and alone in others’ beds I begin to dream about a girl. I dream I sleep next to her, folded into her warmth. When I dress each morning, I try on queerness, marvel in its lightness, revel in its freedom, and eventually stop tucking it back in my duffle before I leave the house. My time borrowing space expired, I spend a whole night curled across two coach Amtrak seats, flickering between different states of consciousness, one of them resembling sleep. The people on the train are different every time I wake.

Returned to my extra long twin mattress with the cheap, soft sheets, I allow myself to unpack my bag, realize I won’t be going home for a while, so instead call this home and mean it. My roommates return at wildly varying times over a period of weeks. I stir at some early hour, surreal in its grayness, hear the roll of a suitcase, realize the last member of my family is reunited. She sits on my bed and plays with my now-shorter hair, telling me about her flight and her family, until I return to sleep.

Curled beside me one night, my partner who is still not yet my partner asks the question can I kiss you, and all at once queer is no longer theory, no longer worn as a proud garment but melded into my skin. Weeks and then months pass, and I continue to fall asleep wrapped in their arms, but with less and less clothes, until it is just us, skin against skin.

They ask me sometime to use different pronouns for them. I fall asleep nestled into a boy, his voice soft enough not to make me forget but remember which of my scars are from men, realize this, this is different, his skin shimmering and whole like mine.

I start crying when I realize I don’t have an address. I can’t stop. I think I cry in my sleep. A second semester expires, reminding me my bed here, too, is a borrowed space, so I begin the process of neatly boxing my life until there is nothing left astray but packing tape and my sheets stretched thinly over my bed and three bare mattresses still smelling faintly of the people I love. I sleep with echoes.

The next morning I move my boxes to university temporary housing, sleep on the same university standard-issue mattress I have begun to call mine, just in a building that is not the one I call home. I start cleaning dorms the next day, work overtime until I’m given a job that will let me work eighteen-hour days. I sleep when I’m not getting paid, tell myself that working brings me a sort of satisfying strain of exhaustion so I don’t think about what it means to need this job.

For the next two months, I sleep under a mosquito net because flying to another country feels less foreign and more safe than flying back to the place I still call home in spite of everything. Each night I flick a flashlight through the untucked sheets, check for spiders and kissing bugs, crawl in, tuck the mosquito net in behind me, marvel that I have trusted something so thin and gauzy with my blood.

I pass long days here, always moving. Realize I miss my family but not my father. Once the sun scorches my skin so badly I fall asleep in something resembling a fever, cringing away from the sheets. I dream of home, wake and can’t remember which place I dreamed about, or if I dreamed of a place at all.

Weeks later on a bus ride into the mountains, I momentarily wake to find myself leaned into a friend’s shoulder and I cannot will myself to move because I am homesick and home-less and touch-starved and the anxiety attack I have when I change my pronouns on Facebook lasts two days and I am so fucking tired. My eyes close again.

Later that night I shiver into unconsciousness under three blankets and no mosquito net, curl my body around a pillow and wish it was a person I love, feel every plank in the bedframe biting into my side.

I drink sometimes now, which is new, fall into something that I know isn’t joy but am willing to pretend is. I tell myself it’s social but it’s not. I pass out in bottom bunks, hoping I wake up sober. I can’t sleep on any of my flights back. I sleep on a friend’s couch instead, sprawled blanketless in the late summer urban heat.

I shuffle from their couch to a relative’s guest bed to a sweaty top bunk in university temporary housing, though I don’t spend much time anywhere. Anxiety keeps me up until two and wakes me up by seven, but it doesn’t matter because I need to be up by six because I’m working eighteen- to twenty-hour days again.

But this time telling myself the body-aching-emotion-sapping exhaustion is worth it is not a cover – for now at least, I am not cleaning up the messes of the rich but serving the needs of the students like me. I gild my sore bones and polish every crack in my notions of home and family and love and each night I sink into bed incapable of dreaming, so instead I pray my students will write differently than me.

The next move brings me to a new place to call home, the least temporary residence I have. My family trickles in until all the empty spaces in our suite are filled and, surrounded by their love, I sleep past seven.

I sleep in the same bed as my partner who is still not yet my partner for the first time in four months, realize I have forgotten how soft his skin his.

I arrange my new pronouns on his tongue, slough off the skin of girl eagerly and woman reluctantly, try to balance nonbinary with all the soured parts of woman that still lay their claims to my mind. I fall asleep with his arm around my waist and my body feels new and unfettered and unruly.

On the night my partner becomes my partner I fall asleep on the couch in my common room, unable to move from the spot where I try to put a word to this is home and I love you and I want to bury all the things hurting me and grow you marigolds, find no label that can trace it, settle for partner. Dawn wakes me and returns me to my bed.

My life slows to the uneventful yet relentless labor of completing a semester, my evenings now quiet without my father’s phone calls. My anxiety fills his absence, assumes his voice, carefully spoon-feeds me everything he would say to me if he knew – you’re still a girl, you’re just confused – these people don’t love you, I thought you were more mature – you’re just lazy, this has nothing to do with your mental health – so I hold ice in my bare hands for minutes at a time to sear the voice out of my head and go to bed early to stop I wish I wasn’t alive from evolving into something much worse.

I start sleeping too much, start taking hours to get out of bed, start doing less until less is nothing, realize not that I’m depressed but that I have capital-D Depression, realize that the ground is solid and all my decisions are made but now I have to begin the business of living with my decisions and without parents.

I start taking medication when it’s the only thing I have enough will left to do. The orange bottles stand watch by my bed, promising me something I don’t want to think of as redemption. I start writing when it’s the only thing I can think to do. Instead of sleeping, I try to string together all the fragmented shards of the last seventeen months of my life, tie all the frayed ends to one other, conceptualize how a person like me becomes.

While my mind spins into sleep, I ask what have I done and try to string together more pieces; whisper what happened to me and search for a pattern in the jagged mosaic, try to make sense of the nonsensical. I question whether I’m writing about love or queerness or family or poverty or womanhood or abuse or growing up or recovery or confusion.

A softer part of me whispers back that my story can be all of those, or none, that maybe it’s something else entirely, maybe it’s arbitrary, maybe that’s okay. I fall asleep still clutching all my questions and dream anyway.