Nothing is concrete, everything is sun. You’re thrown a vague shape and without a way to distinguish what’s what, for all you know, it’s the bloody remnant of war or a poison apple from a hag. But they’ll tell you of course. They’ll tell you exactly what you’re looking at as it surrounds you while fear wrenches at your throat. They’ll tell you and hope you don’t get close enough to smell it for what it really is, a rose waiting to be swallowed whole. You can't remember if they said whether it has thorns or not. 

Your first baby shoes tossed out the year you got your first report card and new bigger wishes were made. I.e. More ripe than healthy. Now potential has cooled and passed on and you sip coffee in the morning, always strong and mostly black because sugar rots the teeth. All the better to power through another day two miles west of the target. Today you will sell 6% more than this day last year and soon you can buy the knee high leather boots that have been on your wish list for eleven years, temporarily jettisoned so far for retirement savings and emergencies and now a mortgage. That’s the amount of time it takes to go from seed to poet. You are still growing exponentially (sideways counts) but who’s looking. New targets grow in the eternal garden.  

After a windy day on the lake, petals drop and settle like constellations on the water. A fraction of time later, they’ve slowly drifted apart into a patternless pocket, too far to smell like any memory. You used to make pictures out of clouds. Today it’s too sunny so you look down instead of up. The glint makes the petals look like sour candy in the wrong place at the wrong time except for you, the innocent bystander. What do you know other than heat and shapes. A swan cuts through. 

Sometimes the softness is a way of cushioning the blow. Like when your idea of sky is falling, more real than when it hails or fog crawls in. You can tell when those things happen, but when the sky falls it’s stealth until it’s all wrong. Think: any Christopher Nolan movie where walking forward is walking up. There’s a knot in your gut but you’re also distracted by the beauty of the optical illusion. You had the same feeling the first time you were distracted by their beauty, and you didn’t know if it was right or a warning sign. How to distinguish nausea from novelty. How much closer living is to dying. How you have now willingly entered the fire pit to catch a butterfly.

There’s no such thing as power-hungry, you think, as your feet soak into the earth with deliberation and unease. Ahead of you, a manic display of foliage threatens to cut you off from the real world. It doesn’t feel right, not at all, but it feels nice. A stranger to your compass of good and evil. The tension makes your heart beat and your senses rush open. Before you fall in too deep a rabbit crosses your path, looks back at you, beckoning. Do you follow or keep sinking? You can’t see more than ten feet beyond but the smell of carrot cake and fresh-crushed mint leaves fill the dense air. You can just tell there is something waiting, a monster with no vocabulary for "trap". 

Your body holds ancient wisdom you can’t even name. So you invented vocabulary, created a dictionary, and assigned feelings to words. The door is always open but there’s food and honey on the table and spiders in the corner. And even though you've been told there's wonder and rivers, you don’t dare go outside; it’s the same as going in. Flying was for birds and gods. Now here you are among them, speaking the same language.

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?