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.

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.