The softness will astound you, a line you’ve written before but like your mom used to say, in one ear and out the other. Now she needs a hearing aid. You can cut through the vague shape of meaning, give it a boundary and a line not to cross over. The satellite is not as impressive as it used to be.

On earth you are mundane. A leaf in a forest. Out there, you are sacred. A leaf in an even bigger forest, dropped into a big pond into a possibly bigger pond. Big is not a word nor a size. It is an orientation the same way you are directed towards envy of those who have more stars than you. Big will show you the stars don’t matter, just the pulse. Like knows like, even across the universe. Because of it, perhaps. You are here because of how big the fresh bread smells. 

Violets sit pretty in the haze of repeats. Blue waters over blue waters, divisible by suns. The pressure to become dusk is all-consuming, a reverse purge or postmodern Cinderella, but when you get past the threshold, cool air prickling at your neck, you will wish for milk and honey, and in return only receive wine. 

You wouldn’t be wrong to say it’s all dirt from here. But weren’t you the one who started out seeing sky and birds, whose only sign of life were cooing sounds? Who, honestly, couldn’t really see at all? Weren’t you the one who cooed back at the tulips and roses when they hung out their necks for you? Who gave you everything for one flash of Eden, before it all went to heaven?

The moth enters as a hologram, injecting itself into zones known to contain joy and secrets. It moves freely, as light as the underside of a shadow. A futuresque thing skipping stones in a stream of time. Echos collapsing onto echos and all of it bearing bright fruit if you have the right glasses on. What will you make of it, pie or fibreless juice. What is the opposite of an effect when you need one?

How do atoms know desire, the pull to come together from dust and lava to make skin and bones, then more skin and bones, until they became empires rising and falling, rising and falling, then more skin and bones, and then more bones than skin. Witchcraft or wizardry before there are wands and spells, before grammar, before even poetry. Before pulse and mind. When stars were more cluster than distant strangers.

Sometimes when you close your eyes the light manages to break past the barrier you made between body and air. But almost always when you bite into a mango there is no barrier, a portal opens sweet and sick with stagnancy. You want to stay here, stay forever. You want the day to be an olive branch, the pivot point between monsters and paradise. A time-space of surrender. A scaffold of senses not of notifications disrupting the silence that could’ve been. The place where you forget the body remember your air.

The bullet train is much faster than you expect it to be, vapour slicing through gravity. You drift off and miss Mount Fuji by a hair, according to a hunch and the map on your phone. When you get off the cherry blossoms are the same as you left them, atoms blooming into a portal you have already exited, relatively speaking. A single moment laps the invention of time. You throw out the door, climb out the window into a whole, pink void. You are obliterating softly.