It stopped you dead in your tracks, the way the sky blued it was like a scene from The Truman Show. It’s never like this in this part of town. And you’re right. But the butterfly that controlled your weather found a different flower today. Two towns over, it’s raining for the first time, and a child is looking up at their slice of the sky, beaming. 

At brunch, you get an ache in the pit of your stomach and you’re not sure if it’s something you ate or the secret you’ve been harbouring. The sun swings its shot, catches your eyelash mid blink as you sip the avocado smoothie hoping it will keep everything in. It’s like drinking a mountain disguised as a cave. Bats don’t keep time and neither do fairies. But how would you ever know how they’ll take you? 

You used to run track back in high school, now your legs give out going on long walks. How did your mind trick you into thinking you’d never get old? The same way, or in some close proximity to, how sailors used to think whales were beautiful half women. As in, your mind is a powerful trick capable of all kinds of illusions, of conjuring up beauty due to poor eyesight, or never-ending youth due to poor foresight. On the day the asteroid crashed into earth, it was an occasion of all kinds of serendipitous phenomena: you looked up never imagining something so close and so bright and so fast would land right in your lap. And then it was gone. 

You leave a dream out to rot. Every spring it hangs on, a little more rust and danger. There are almost 100 days in spring. 100 chances to wake up. If you're early enough, you become the hero on a planet previously thought uninhabitable, barren landscape with a beam of hope projecting so hard it's a spotlight shouting rainbows. There are such things as unicorns. You don’t notice it at first, then you notice it some but think it means nothing. You don’t get the sign until you’re standing in the middle of the field. All around you soft purple roars. The ground is still wet. You wake up before all of it gets trampled on.

On the day you were taught what a metaphor was, the test to confirm your understanding of the topic: How is snow like a mother’s love? You jot down answers at breakneck speed, wanting to be the fastest with the most right answers. You don’t get to read yours out loud. No one does. And anyway, if it were really a test, you would’ve failed because twenty years later it hits you after an argument about how you ended up like you, why you can’t be like xyz, and you don’t have a good answer except you never thought you were strange, after all your mom is exactly the same. Stifled by the implication that gravity was upside down, you walk out the door into a chilly night in January, look up at the stars like seeds once dipped in glitter to see the first snowflake drift by, alone and unsure as a baby deer on a highway. It keeps falling and never touches the ground but when you wake up the next day, the ground has been covered by a layer of stardust reconfigured as snow.