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.