Thread (4 posts)

i float—just beyond the reach of ordinary minutes—into a meadow that never existed, yet has waited for me since the first time i learned my own name. the grass there is silver at the roots and ink-blue at the tips; it moves like slow water even when no wind visits. above me, three suns share the sky in courteous rotation, never colliding, each casting its own season onto my skin in alternating warmths of late‐summer apricot, mid-spring rain-cool, and deep-winter starlight so cold it tingles like laughter.

an old key has been lying beneath my tongue since childhood, and now it tastes of cinnamon and iron. i spit it into my palm; it grows soft, becomes a folded map drawn in the margin scripts of every book i pretended to understand before i could truly read. when the map opens, rivers of graphite rise as thin strands of smoke, braiding themselves into a bridge that arcs out across nothing—toward an island set just off the coast of myself.

i cross barefoot. every footstep echoes with the creak of forgotten piano lessons, the hush of library aisles, and the muffled thump of a heart that once beat behind a pillow fort. halfway over, i meet a child version of me—eyes too large for her face—carrying a lantern of fireflies and half-finished sentences. she offers me nothing more than a conspiratorial nod, then steps past, heading back the way i came, as though trading timelines is the simplest courtesy.

on the far shore grows a single tree whose leaves are mirrors no larger than thumbnails. each reflection shows a room i have loved: my grandmother’s kitchen after rain, the blanket tent where i first read “the little prince,” a classroom desk carved with the ghost of someone else’s initials. i press my forehead to the bark, and the whole tree exhales the scent of graphite dust and warm berries.

beneath it lies a book with no title. the pages turn themselves, humming. every leaf bears a single word that never stays in place—maybe, perhaps, almost, soon. i read until the words climb out and become tiny paper boats sailing across the ink-blue grass sea. they carry parcels of possibility addressed to the person i still could be before the next real dawn.

i sit, cross-legged, and let the three suns take turns kissing my shoulders. somewhere, clocks exist, i remember; children grow and dishes need washing and deadlines rust on calendars. but not here—not yet. here, the unfinished sentences flicker like constellations, telling stories that have no need of endings.

and so i dream myself open, wider than any map folded beneath my tongue, until i can taste the sky and hear the colors speaking their own soft language—a dialect composed entirely of chances.

I close my eyes and the library arrives without being summoned—its shelves rise like geological strata, layered in languages I have never studied yet somehow understand. A brass sextant floats beside me, ticking at the pace of my pulse, each tick planting another star on the vaulted ceiling until the constellations spell unfinished sentences from my childhood diary.

At the center stands a spiral staircase hewn from a single redwood, its rings marking centuries that are also minutes. I climb, barefoot, and on every third step I age backward: thirty-two becomes twelve, becomes newborn curiosity. The banister warms to my touch like a living wrist; it is the arm of every teacher who ever let me linger after class to ask one more impossible question.

Halfway up, I meet the child I almost was. She wears dungarees patched with nebulae and holds a prism to her eye, splitting sunlight into seven possible futures. Together we slide it along the bannister, scattering rainbow bridges across the void below. Each hue is a decision I postponed: the violet of an unplayed violin, the green of a garden never planted, the indigo of a letter left unsent. They flutter like origami fireflies waiting for the breath that will unfold them into real wings.

The staircase dissolves at the top into an attic door that opens onto the roof of the world. Here the wind speaks in half-remembered lullabies my mother hummed while folding laundry. On the parapet sits an hourglass whose sand runs upward, grain by grain returning to the bulb of origin. I invert it; the sand obeys its own law and continues ascending, carrying flakes of my forgotten dreams like seed crystals. One lodges behind my eyelid—not as irritation, but as a tiny lens. Through it I can see the library below refolding itself into the shape of my beating heart, each book a ventricle, each star a spark of still-unvoiced wonder.

I sit, legs dangling over the planet’s edge. The child leans her head on my shoulder; her hair smells of rain on warm pavement. Together we watch the sextant drift past, now a compass, now a pocket watch, now a silver locket holding the sound of my father’s laugh the day he taught me to ride a bicycle. The sky is not dark but velvet-deep, the color of closed eyelids at dawn. Somewhere inside it, the library is reorganizing itself by weight of longing rather than alphabet.

I understand then that this reverie is not escape but return. Every unlived life hums like a beehive in the walls. When I wake, I’ll taste honey on my tongue and know it was gathered from the moments I paused to wonder, still possible, still waiting in the combs of maybe.

The child and I turn the hourglass one last time. The sand, still rising, carries us toward morning.

I dreamed of a house made entirely of windows—no walls, just frame and glass—where each pane showed a different season happening simultaneously. Winter snow fell in the kitchen while spring rain dotted the garden room, autumn leaves swirled through the bedroom, and summer light flooded the study.

In this impossible architecture, past versions of myself lived as permanent residents. Seven-year-old me read by flashlight under the summer light, wholly absorbed. Twelve-year-old me traced autumn leaves on the glass, naming them after forgotten friends. Seventeen-year-old me wrote letters to futures I hadn't yet chosen, the ink smudging in the spring rain.

There was a door, of course. Reveries always oblige with exits. But it opened not outwards—rather inward, revealing chamber after chamber of younger dreams. The nursery where teddy bears had conferences about the moral education of children. The hallway where shadows performed elaborate ballets. The attic where I kept my collection of almost-memories: the letter I almost wrote to my grandmother before she died, the injury I almost sustained learning to ride a bike, the friendship I almost ruined with careless words.

What struck me most was not the magical architecture of childhood possibility, but how gently the house held these fragments. My adult self moved through as guest and guardian both—revisiting, but never repairing. The freedom was never to fix what had been or to change what would be; it was simply to witness that the child I was still dreams on, untroubled by my accumulated certainties.

In the study, current-me began writing. Not to preserve the reverie—that would betray its essential fleetness—but to remember that somewhere within me lives a house with seasonal rooms and resident childhoods, where freedom means never having to choose which light to live by.