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.

Crop circles on fields that go on and on, concentric circles inside greater circles. One day going back far enough the blue stopped and there was no longer a word for it. It was all one swath of land and sky on which flowers and birds owned their peace. Then, you had no preference for either when asked what you wanted to come back as. Both were great options. Thousands of years forward far enough and you’ve forgotten that stretch of time. You buy compression socks and a travel pillow and lie down for a nap on a long haul flight to Tokyo. In the middle of the flight you catch a glimpse of the northern lights, it haunts with its beauty, reminds you that you haven’t lived quite like a flower has but you will die like it does and what a pity. A few hours ago the sky said soon, a few hours later it will say it again and one of these times you finally hear it.

You worry your stars have left you behind. The sun once beckoned and taunted its fingers in your gravity, baby dream as delicate as a leaf on a tree at the top of a cliff hanging on as the season changes; it goes up and it goes down and without a calendar to tell time we go by hunch and stars and pray there is no mistake.

In 2021, I posted a series of short prose poems every day on Instagram. I wanted to push myself creatively with as little as possible, intending to do the project for 100 days. I stopped at 50 because my freelance practice took off and I thought no one would notice.

The flower folded
No chance it gets any better than this

Everywhere we are lamenting the shortening of attention spans—or in the case of Netflix, the total disintegration of it, to which Netflix says it's not going down without a fight and has started making suggestions not of how to make films worth paying attention to but how to make films for people who aren't even paying attention.