These days I lack the long-term focus to watch movies. An hour-long drama pushes my limits; halfway through I think "What was I just doing?" which turns into "Is it me, or is this show not terribly interesting?" It's me. Right now, it's always me.

Even reading books takes up more concentration than I can sometimes handle; on the F train I catch myself re-reading the same page again and again, forcing myself to process the words, feeling them, recognizing them, but somehow not understanding them, until finally I arrive at my stop and join the crowd going up the often-broken escalator.

August is restless for me but it's also cool, transformative, unlike any other month I've experienced. This year, August mornings are autumnal. I walk down Lafayette Street and notice the shadows are longer. The sun is always moving but somehow we never really see it until August is almost over, when it's too late to remember to do anything about it.

So August moves on and with it the summer and the world and the news. Too much news. Back in the early aughts when the Iraq war first began I had a coworker who would come into the office bleary-eyed and late, behind on deadlines. "I just can't stop watching war coverage," she would say. That's how I feel this week. I check the #ferguson stream constantly; I stew, I cry, I seethe. I can't focus on much, but I can focus on that hashtag, I guess.

There is nothing for me to do but breathe through it all: the restlessness, the anger, the fear, the fatigue. The time passing. The future. I take so many deep breaths, so many sighs, that people ask me if I'm okay, what's wrong, why are you sighing. But it's just the way I try to recenter myself. It's just me, getting through the month and the world the only way I know how.