Half here, half there. It could go either way, your devotion to staying in this blue. But most likely, the house will fall further toward the horizon, and you folded back into the mirror that holds your ego taut. You hit the wall at the bottom. The tide is still. The stars still fall. Someone is clutching their pearls.

You were once asked, which sense you would sacrifice. (A hypothetical question.) Almost everyone says taste. You can run out of ways to describe honey, but you can’t run out of ways to taste it. You will taste sweetness and think of pine trees in the desert, a treasured gift from the mer-king, pits of time lost. Without it, you will still live, but will you die?

This place requires no exit strategy. Hanging off the trapeze is like being cradled by something that gives your nerves a lush and stellar kind of comfort. Everything you need is inside these curves. But the clouds inch toward you, hold a blade to your god—and you are the one twisting the knife. You become a cocoon who in its mind, grew its wings and colours last winter. So you want out, you want more than green and now, but there’s no garden in freedom. Only freedom. Relax, you were already on the way to the exit the moment you arrived.

Summer showed up unattended. A tepid mood burning blue in the pool water, some song from the 80s lightly skimming the periphery. As if everything was contingent on this stillness. As if you weren’t carrying so much. The air changes but nothing else does. A meteor will fall tonight, break the atmosphere and carry a descendant star to its death on a single blooming magnolia chosen for the task. For now, the sky pretends to be more than it is, a tweak brighter for you, in case things weren’t clear enough. How real can anything be given the choice?

Crows descend looking for wisdom or sustenance. Can you tell which from looking into their eyes? No one can, that’s why time stops, a lurch not a rip. But it goes quick, like forever. They eat and they fly. You can still promise tomorrow. The dandelion shakes and honey still loves your mouth. 

A pile of invisible love letters sent out to the universe, like leaves in a quantum world. Nothing happens. Nothing as far as you can see. But imagine crushed mint, split guava, and swollen fantasies about to burst into pulp. Imagine beyond that, a thing you have no words for. The opposite of space, perpendicular to time. Imagine your letters answered, a note writing back in stems and cells. Imagine that. Then imagine: this is not a test. You are the leaf and the love letter and the wind pulling you in every direction with nothing to tell you where to go. Nothing. 

There are no straight lines in nature. The closer you look the more fractured every edge. The further you look the more you see it all curves upon itself. A marble from where you are. A star from where the marble is. A galaxy far, far away where there is no line to pull you back. But you can look through the kaleidoscope and marvel at how everything shows up prismatic in hindsight and story. You’ve always had a talent for drawing straight lines where there are none.

You oscillate too often for a linear line to form, setting your sights on everything a run-on sentence abstracted into a human. At 2am, you see only what you want to see, you are only what you really are, a mad scientist experimenting with a thing called life, seeking paradise in a crowd of atoms. There are no straight lines in nature, only illusions. Every day you are further from eureka and closer to a new question. Every five years you are getting somewhere. Every twenty five, you aren’t.