Everyone is out there building their beautiful lives, spinning families and ambition from threads pulled somewhere down the line. A child then three. One condo then another until you are a landlord. Maybe in a few generations you will have wealth, maybe it’s the next if you play your cards right. Spoiler: on the space-yacht someone made it, and they’ll have forgotten your name, know nothing about your values or beliefs and certainly none of your insecurities. There are no more traces of cotton and the sun is an outline. When they come up on the shimmering wormhole looking for somewhere new to place the altar, wonder is the same idea as sustenance. The word for it doesn’t exist to you but you fold your sheets and go to work and tell fairy tales to your kids.

You don’t need to believe in aliens. They have not evolved towards a deep-seated need for validation, inventing methods and madness to measure themselves against themselves. They take their time to rearrange themselves for optimal viewing of the universe, so naturally, they found some signal across the universe looking to you as example. A curious and questionable tension. But atoms don’t ask questions, they just test and test and test. You think when the seed bears fruit, you’ve found success. It’s all just peaches and blood and nonsense. In other words, math.

There once was a hero crossing oceans and tornadoes to journey home. Now that home is cast in bronze and every garden is a graveyard. You are the hero, plucked, thawed, lifted. The stem swims and it stops until it finds a quiet place to bloom. So now you are in a museum looking for clues. For what exactly, you don’t know. The vase fits many flowers. There are many vases. And over there, plates, jewels, and scrolls. Another room. Another hall. Another and another and another until there is everything left.

You follow your kid dreams to Disneyland, not the closest one no that’s too pedestrian you’ve already been there twice. You travel to the other side of the world, try to find another way back to the best place on earth. When you get home, the difference is stark but the streets are just as flush pink, if you squint hard enough you could mistake one for the other. But one is a stunted child in beige uniform who may never grow up, you fear, the beige from the other is just the average colour of an entire universe. You wash out the white chocolate popcorn smell from your Peter Pan popcorn bucket so it doesn’t start to mould. In a few weeks you sniff it but you scrubbed it too well, all you can smell now are the jasmine flowers surprising you from the side.

Bright pulsing lights taken as a dance floor, sweat as endorphins. If there could’ve been a clearer sign for danger that would’ve been the best case scenario. A maze through a video game with solid warnings instead of hunches you can just shake off. Come to think of it, a sign the scale of a solar flare would suffice. What did it matter anyway? Two decades later you are having coffee with whipped cream on the patio having ignored almost every sign except the one that said go.