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.

Home hums, the air thick like the inside of an overripe cherry split open. Kool-Aid stains on the counter, a bowl of Froot Loops dissolving into milk colouring it sweet, and a chair always slightly pulled out. The seat’s still warm. Honeyed light drips through the blinds, just behind the boxy TV that’s been left on too long. Outside, the sun shakes. Vines creep through the cracks, flickers of backyards and then plants everywhere, dying, dying then replaced by new plants. The floorboards remember every step of your light-up sneakers and then the clack-clack of stilettos when you were learning to walk for a second time. A mirror splints into every shade of blue, folding into the hush; it’s the only thing that’s seen all of you. All the shadows and stairways leading nowhere, plot twists and close encounters, and then, finally, somewhere—a doorway, the shape of something just before you wake, realizing you’ve been singing the wrong lyrics to a song for years, and off tune and off path, here and alive and with a cloud in your belly, you still managed to make a home.

You finish milking the cow. Smelling like hay and thunderstorms, you head back in. The leftover pasta has gone cold. Cherry tomatoes on top, the kind that bursts, now stale. There are bottles on the table, uncapped and utterly un-arranged. You turn on something while you wait. The barn is made of aluminum alloy and the cow is 50% real. What milk, there hasn’t been since you left earth 14 years ago. You drown the silence in more extrait de parfum, let it fill the air with solid ground and ideas of a former heaven. It feels closer than ever but you're in the bubble eating ice cream.

9:43pm in June and the night is ripe. Dyed dark denim, skinny. Blueberry stained lips. A lukewarm, slow-beating pulse still wishing for things to change. Blueberry milk nails. Faded baby blue jeans, wide and saggy. 5:42am twenty years later. 

The goddess on the moon isn't real but the story still gets passed on. Your mother said Pearl was her favourite name when you asked, then two decades later when you asked her again she says she doesn’t remember. All this time you took her words to heart, thought about her dumplings every time you walked by the fancy jewelry store, caught yourself staring at the rounded edge of your Mac mini on the corner of your desk. There is no one out there but the stars burn bright and lovely. Pearl farming was once a science experiment, and you were once a dream.

Next to the mall for old people, a cacophony of youth. Spring break, fresh puddles, a bed of cotton candy. The smell of waffle cone and rubber boots, the garish plastic tarp that can't hide car fumes from the parking lot. You are holding someone’s hand, their face is vague. An obnoxiously loud alarm sounds. You jerk awake, the candy apple has been bitten. Your fingers open like a jellyfish releasing its prey, a reflex you learned by now and a memory of a memory escapes; an echo.

Sparkling kitchen soaked with Lysol, kettle boiling and milk bread in the toaster. Leave the butter out, it stayed too long in the fridge. Crumbs rainbowed, ran circles around you while you manifested success and financial security, and now the orange is a mandarin. You don’t cut them the same way your grandma did. You don’t cut them at all. Pulp drips from your fingers. There’s always a carrot dangling on a daisy chain.