I was a machine, now I am alive.

The aperture opens to milk, sugar, love, and candy. It’s too much for something that was just a dot not too long ago. You settle for names and numbers. More names, bigger numbers. Collecting them in time for the review you imagine is waiting. The white rabbit appears every time the clock strikes midnight. But you don’t turn into anything, you never turn into anything. The incoherence of your dreams is in inverse proportion to the dishonesty of your reality. Stay a bit longer, until you forget your clock. Until you start telling time by the quality of your gaze. Until you follow the rabbit into the puddle, come back out alive. And there you are, tinier than ever. There is blue as far as the eye can see. 

They can’t make a neon that outlasts UV. Just like you can’t scale down to grey and make all the colours big. But you keep trying, each attempt use a different chord until the entire song comes out in pieces. A mess of notes and their unseen harmony. And there, green is the widest colour. 

Crushed petal on the ground, a solid eon away from progress. You might as well be going back, pivot towards alkaline waters. Back to when you thought blubbery small whales were mermaids, when you’d believe in your body’s way of playing pretend. 

Golden hour is a metaphor delivered by light. The spin of a planet trying once again to get to the point. Your feet in the sand’s hourglass, catching the last stranded ray coming through the curtains. On the other side, daylight and shadows with no lungs. There is nothing brighter than now.

A flower hangs on the tip of your tongue, hesitant to lean in the wrong direction. What is real and what is engineered? Unsure of its stance it remains curled. A crowd congregates and under enough pressure, a garden spontaneously combusts into life, bursting with everything you designed your body for. That’s not the right way to say it, but language takes a while to catch up to poetry. After much debate and philosophical quandary, you are resolute in your final answer: there is no sound in the forest without you. There is no smell to inhale nor picture to frame either. The answer to every question is yes. 

You try to rise to every occasion, get out of the freshly laundered rot you buried yourself in. The tides and stars churn from pulp to revolution, farm to table, and vice versa. There and back again, if you’re lucky. When you look out the way you came, the pale blue is lost and replaced with other colours painstakingly conjured in a lab. Godspeed compared to evolution. Come and gone, like everything else. And in the end, a choice: blood or jam. The machine only reaps two kinds of rewards.

Morning light caught across a glass lake and a digital replica in approximation of. Here you are, on day one of another round at The Artist’s Way. Not a single horizon full. Enough black coffee: today you drink strawberry milk, made with 100% natural ingredients. It takes more time and fewer buttons. An actual date, not just another looping sunrise. Wonder unfolds at the rate of softening. Soft doesn’t care about your hustle, only your light and grind.

Stacks of sugar and proof. You are a girl under the influence, until you’ve seen enough to see that nobody knows anything. Every opinion is a projection and sometimes it’s retaliation. Wanting to know the truth is like venturing into a forest, answering a noble call and eating mushrooms. You can try to convince yourself it’s not poisonous but you already know. Someone once said you can be all things, that humans contain multitudes, they even put it on a sign. All things get swallowed eventually.

The sky, Lupita’s gown, Cinderella, Smurfs, the sky, you, Sailor Mercury, the sky, you, 8-bit skies, Frutiger skies, you, the sky, you, the sky, you, the sky. What else is blue? 

The field of flowers attacks your senses. A saving grace turning a straight line into a bulb. No matter how many times you are dropped into the scene, you adjust to the green. You forget all about stars until tonight.

The pale blue rolls in, weighing the same as your last page. Dilation of all sorts, sweet pollen and eventually, honey and yum. Light you interpret as serene and blooming, before the nausea of knowing what speed you’re hurtling through the uncontainable sets in. A new story won’t write itself, but the bees know what the flowers want from the way they taste. A cluster of lonely strangers delivering soft blows to each other, playing pretend in the lily-strewn haze.

You believe in happy endings. Shooting stars, time, eclipse, time, orbit, star. You see the sunset you are inside of.

Metals and hums in the air. A leaf does not exist on a naked branch, then one day it does, the entire thing does, and you were there the whole time but when did it happen? You can’t pinpoint it. But you can look out the window, see the whole thing—and stop waiting between the lines because there are none, only seasons and electricity. The window is the only thing between you. 

A drop of blue changes everything. You are a shadow on the wall, and somewhere another you is watching your shadow. Shadow is just an approximation, just like the forest is an approximate location of music. You are filled with it. Everything is a balloon, roughly. 

Juicy berries, fresh cut stems, warm sap—tingle or jar, and sometimes neither, and sometimes nothing but make it ugly just to prove you can. How many times can you read an interpretation of a perfume, opposite thoughts and very strong opinions, before you understand how it smells. The same way you can listen to their account of what happened: the birth, sweet or violent, and then hear tales of their adolescence squeezed dry or ripening, the way they talk about you. The way some say the stars twinkle, while others shoot, never look up and realize they are made of the same thing. There is no such thing as real when everything is.

Try to turn the sun into a lump, you can’t. It’s wrapped around the sky, wrapped around what appears to be a pale blue dot, pierced by light. A skewer of chaos finally cooling down after all this time, relic of blue order from the formerly violent night. Every day’s a little bit shorter, wind a notch stronger, wings beating a little harder to maintain an airborne demeanour, but you don’t notice. Your shoulders drop because it doesn’t matter what the difference between light and shadow is, as long as there is one.

You are a monster thirsting for art and banana milk and plush ecstatic. Trying to be softer, but the only place that comes naturally is in the dark where there is no one there to see. The dark is a time not a place. In the light, you shine like a princess. The monster compresses into a pea, and you sleep on it. 

Panic and prayer, grief and glitter: everything in a skin held tight and compact so nothing escapes beyond a two feet radius, so no one can see how big you really are. Five feet five, weighing less than a you-shaped bucket of stars—it’s a miracle. Now you've got mountains to climb and sunsets to see off, but the clouds hang low and the sky is more orange than blue. First it was nothing and soon it is neither. You will have many more feelings and words for it this time around. For everything.

Time is stuck inside a glacier, and prone only to sending subliminal messages. Choose either warning or invitation. You might as well be floating, but it’s still cold when there are no seconds to watch. And damn it, without a way to measure life you still have nerves and gravity. So you plunge. You plunge into a bright and forgiving emptiness. And at the shore, the flowers have no temperature but the fields they make are warm and lovely. 

A pink petal falls from the skies, a lottery helping you orient your beliefs toward your body. You’ve never met a whole flower, can’t even comprehend the shape, or the use. Below there is a constellation of roots making them every June. In this skin, the petal is your moon. It’s too early for stars. 

You find a spot right next to the air conditioning vent, sit down with a mound of shaved ice drizzled with condensed milk, mint leaf and grass jelly on top. A memory that always feels like the first time. The only kind of memory you want now that the heat is gone. You never remember passion, only how the rush tastes—on your tongue, in your throat, in the pit that once caged butterflies.

Midsummer day on a spinning dot. Daisies and hummingbirds, two by two, unicorns, too—folding into the horizon line. There are no shadows in the wormhole. A rabbit with airplane ears pops out from somewhere in China. All of them, looking for you. And you are just out here looking for a job, trying to catch a star before it drifts beyond the bend.

The white room turns golden as if gods are about to descend or decimate. You won’t know which because beauty and light precedes all events, even the great and terrible. And this is a room made for everything. The baby is a monster, the monster is a baby. The seed is a trap, the trap is a seed. All this, made up. A room is a made-up place. You are a room. Arrival is not a place entered; it is a prerequisite. 

It’s sunset at the department store. Photo booths inside obnoxiously lit arcades and giant fake flower arrangements looming in its best impression of a tropical getaway. First it piques your attention, then you think it’s cheesy, then give it a little space and it’s self-aware and satirical to the point of interesting. At least it’s not afraid to tell it like it is, yes in fact you have felt like that what a great question what a simple question why has no one asked. Well, it’s simple: everyone’s stuck in a loop and the escalators are not working. 

You pinky-swear, I’ll never let go and mean it more than Rose meant with Jack. The line is drawn: child to grown up, romantic to impressionist. Every year the ratio to time spent next to the pool increases, and somehow you become mindful of the survival of others. The rabbit is buried in the ground and it’s not a matter of distance but effort. There is no leap, only a step obscured in limestone and sometimes all it takes is a little desperation, and the feeling of nostalgia is what they call missing something real. 

Night blooming jasmine, smoke leftover from fireworks, your body and air lingering in the heat wave like it’s a vow. An entire galaxy compressed into a piece of sky is hanging over you like a reminder that the night is young and the days are long but a life is short. Run it like an orchestral arrangement, an electric crescendo running at high fever. Noon is time for staccato, a kind of dance you can measure, but your bones are way past that now. Drag them back into the light, any light will do. 

In the greenhouse, tomatoes on vines grow at the speed of gravity. It’s a circadian paradise tucked in shadows, time ticking to fruit and flowering, far away from the dying sun. Instead of bursting into flames—what, did you think you were fire?—you morph into bubbles grasping for something to hold onto. You are here for them, they are here for you. Everything else is everything else. Peace and thunder compound and the dandelions rush in. 

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. 

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. 

Sparkles drape themselves over every surface and idea, your cheeks the highlight of the night. You thought that was the statement. Here, someone dares to wear fuchsia, breaking the simulation’s idea of appropriate. So of course there are more eyes to confirm the existence of the glitch. Someone with too many ideas of fun, who gives away a flower, real or not, to everyone they meet, who started listening to new music at 33 and hasn’t stopped since. 

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 line to fly, 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. 

The screen blinks with news on arrivals and departures. You look for your turn. An atom learning cursive, if you skip a few steps. Now you’re just outside Vegas looking in, calling it Vegas, vast desert wanderer setting sights on the chance of rain. A saddle on a unicorn.

You are suspended in a pool somewhere past the deep end. There must be a cathedral underneath; you can tell from the stars above, their colourless light shifting in ways that pluck worry from your body until you are full of life and quiet. Violets are bluer than the water until it gets dark. 

Roots invisible beneath the soil in a forest full of escape artists and fingerpainters. A spaceship once took some men to the moon. There was already a woman there, she didn’t think to plant a flag, there is no such thing as a country when you fly out far enough. There is no such thing as anything when you fly out far enough. Maybe better stories.

A war. A hunt. Now trees and cars and war analogies and hauls. Here, at least. Legends of treasure, now myths of bonuses. Wait, sorry, that was 30 years ago and also here, at least. You know your birth chart, the results of your birthday on your destiny. You credit your rising Scorpio more than your trauma. You know there is no such thing as destiny. You know because you're not silly, just looking for a map. There is a car, there is gas. There is a star made of gas. Carl Sagan said you are made of star-stuff. You look out the window, try to funnel stardust into poetry. It's hard being on the inside. Try being soft next time. 

The morning is soft enough to enter your body. Enough times, and you turn it into art.

Photosynthesis was invented by a cell freed by the sun. Somewhere along the way, Tinkerbell and after that, a fairy tale becomes folklore becomes tongue. The garden flickers like your grammar. 

Serenity is suspended but the vibes are not. There is a swarm of bugs following you down many blocks, disappearing then reappearing as if swallowed by a black hole and then returned to trick you into a sense of normalcy, just a little bit of manic here and there as appropriate. Bushes of fuchsia flowers like slow-moving tornadoes cling to life, emitting SOS signals. Will you remember this colour, this smell? You make a mental note to self, a brilliant idea for a line fully formed to take on all kinds of blasphemy and delusion. Share it to deliver the illusion of ascending beyond trauma. Twenty steps later it has already fallen to the edge of your brain. You are a bionic flower shedding a steel shell. 

A bird on the power line, as if waiting for something. You are waiting for it to play its cards when waiting, as you call it, is its entire game. Waiting for the sky to say it’s time to go home. Waiting for the revolving door to open. That’s what it seems like to you, fly or a god variant you. It’s just looking for the right moment, of which there are many, of which there are none.

You've seen this scene many times, every single year since you’ve been alive. Long ago, you paid attention when you were horizontal by default, looking up to cast a fishing line toward an end game. Peace and go. As you grow up, become a vertical creature, you make it a habit to look ahead instead. But the trees in this neighbourhood are old and tall, nature's sleight of hand to draw the eye up. This time it feels alien, like catching a ghost stalking you from heaven and not having the vocabulary or the guts to say so. See also: witnessing a glitch in the atmosphere and getting your memory wiped. How else can you explain the way your feet still carry you fine after all that, how you can even conjure a metaphor from scraps of stardust and murk—that is what you are—why the leaf dances and you can't tell if you are being called to from the past or the future, how many rings it takes to pick up the phone.

You had high hopes for the plant labelled easy-care from Ikea. Bought two of them before spring cracked open. The timing wasn’t right, but there was a sale. You left them out on the patio and one day the air dipped and you read about it after: April’s record low. You try every day to bring them back to life, but they’re already gone. All efforts are like placing ash on a dead body, trying to cover up the smell. This weeks-long attempt at CPR gave you time to mourn, some time to grieve yet another thing you’ve murdered. You’re practically a serial killer, this last stroke of inspiration now the scene of a double homicide, and everyone who drives by knows; they can tell from the brown, the way each branch weeps, some snapped in half by the accomplice who will never get named, only you. The last straw is when you decide to prune all the decay and brokenness—something like one step back, two steps forward—and when you are done, mad with ambition and pretend garden shears, you step back to admire your work. A sculpture if you squint hard enough. In a few months, there is a garden in its place; the killer reformed by an inmate: “If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, make a garden.” That summer you forget about shortcuts and hacks, forget time, find yourself in the weeds and stay there.

You were there that morning when the backdoor was left open, a portal connecting you to a birds-eye view somewhere in the Atlantic. What is it like to breathe air no one has breathed before? Sublime. But you had no control of time, it ticks without your consent. You see velvet ankle-length dresses in April, an iceberg on the horizon. It’s dangerous to be this close. So you turn your back, close the door before you can be split in two: potential vs spectre. The difference between romance and disaster is somewhere along the line, how far you go to stir the pot. On your couch, the ticking continues as variant: a beating heart, steady and unrelenting. Night surrounds you like a cave still porous.  

Your memories act like overgrown vines, moving from room to room and making up muscles and form along the way. One day the house is covered, entire ecosystems sprouting from all over, most whispering nonsense vaguely disguised as truth. Of course you believe it. Were it not for these vines and all the roses and honey you’ve reaped, the day is simply too much to contain. Where is it, and when did it happen, how long has it been like this—the mutation that led to the fork: supernova wearing a clown suit, or most mediocre star on this planet. And which did you take, or did you refuse the choice, it’s hard to tell.  The vines close in from behind, leaving gaps where light can still escape. Roots reach the sky before flowers do.

What was it like the first time someone had a dream? It must be as close to the first time you saw them, you think. Like watching a star grow at a million x speed, then hitting play right before it dies. There is a shore that only became a shore that first time, and then it was just a shore and the edge between ocean and sky indiscriminate. The sinking feeling of change was imminent, because an invisible bridge had now been built and your only choice was to walk through it. How do you walk along the shore if you don’t know where your edges are? Your desires paint them in glitter and stoke them with heat, and you beg the moon to watch over you.

You don’t need to believe in aliens. They have not evolved towards a deep-seated need for validation, inventing methods and madness to measure themselves against themselves. They take their time to rearrange themselves for optimal viewing of the universe, so naturally, they found some signal across the universe looking to you as example. A curious and questionable tension. But atoms don’t ask questions, they just test and test and test. You think when the seed bears fruit, you’ve found success. It’s all just peaches and blood and nonsense. In other words, math.

There once was a hero crossing oceans and tornadoes to journey home. Now that home is cast in bronze and every garden is a graveyard. You are the hero, plucked, thawed, lifted. The stem swims and it stops until it finds a quiet place to bloom. So now you are in a museum looking for clues. For what exactly, you don’t know. The vase fits many flowers. There are many vases. And over there, plates, jewels, and scrolls. Another room. Another hall. Another and another and another until there is everything left.

Bright pulsing lights taken as a dance floor, sweat as endorphins. If there could’ve been a clearer sign for danger that would’ve been the best case scenario. A maze through a video game with solid warnings instead of hunches you can just shake off. Come to think of it, a sign the scale of a solar flare would suffice. What did it matter anyway? Two decades later you are having coffee with whipped cream on the patio having ignored almost every sign except the one that said go.

The ground is no longer wet from last night’s monsoon, and you wouldn’t know it was ever here, all the soaked concrete pat down dry, except that the grass is bright and quenched and alive. The best way to determine their peace is the lack of smell. They want to stay out of memory, just a sweep of green in the background of a milestoned life. But all you remember is when they die, and you take in the air like you take in the good wine. All that water for your feast.

There is something inside you humming in a colour too loud to ignore. Ideas to hatch and places to go. An endless buzz inside your mind, manifested into a vision board or many full of wants, wants, more wants. But the reality of the situation is that you were moving at a turtle’s pace and then made to feel okay about it. You thought this was it, this is you, and that’s fine. You've made it in the surviving-with-benefits sense. Then you were softened, shaken, astounded, and broken. You hitched ride after ride, carried one by one to the next stop not by a tech bro or guru, but by artists. One day, the train stopped and you peeled back the petals. Your name was on it, waiting for you to get on and steer, drive, fly, whatever you need to keep moving, because there is still something inside you humming, and now you know what it is. You asked for something to change, for some kind of momentum, a sign? You got it baby, now go.

Today, the shadows on your desk dance more suggestively than clouds. You've been watching them all afternoon trying to wrangle their way into this dimension. Outside, in this timeline, work days are ending and later, when rush hour is over, the only thing left to hear are birds chirping, the sound of a meadow dripping with sun for a few more good hours. Maybe you're no longer looking for eureka in the dark. Maybe the light has already reached you. Maybe it's okay if you don't know, it will try again tomorrow. It's the fastest thing in the world and it will keep trying to find a way to spend another moment with you. 

Nothing is concrete, everything is sun. You’re thrown a vague shape and without a way to distinguish what’s what, for all you know, it’s the bloody remnant of war or a poison apple from a hag. But they’ll tell you of course. They’ll tell you exactly what you’re looking at as it surrounds you while fear wrenches at your throat. They’ll tell you and hope you don’t get close enough to smell it for what it really is, a rose waiting to be swallowed whole. 

Your first baby shoes tossed out the year you got your first report card and new bigger wishes were made. I.e. More ripe than healthy. Now potential has cooled and passed on and you sip coffee in the morning, always strong and mostly black because sugar rots the teeth. All the better to power through another day two miles west of the target. Today you will sell 6% more than this day last year and soon you can buy the knee high leather boots that have been on your wish list for eleven years, temporarily jettisoned so far for retirement savings and emergencies and now a mortgage. That’s the amount of time it takes to go from seed to poet. You are still growing exponentially (sideways counts) but who’s looking. New targets grow in the eternal garden. 

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.

Feet sinking into the earth, and you are utterly aware of it. Shallow, gnawing sensation. 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. Nice—slick and easy—is a good stretch away from the burning empire. A stranger to your compass of good and evil. The tension makes your heart beat and your senses rush open. Before you fall 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.

At brunch, you get an ache in the pit of your stomach and you’re not sure if it’s something you ate or the secret you’ve been harbouring. The sun swings its shot, catches your eyelash mid blink as you sip the avocado smoothie hoping it will keep everything in. It’s like drinking a mountain disguised as a cave. Bats don’t keep time and neither do fairies. But how would you ever know how they’ll take you?

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.