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.