Whoever had taken enough time to bury their dead had also drawn a symbol in the sand of the mound. Brutha half-expected it to be a turtle, but the desert wind had not quite eroded the crude shape of a pair of horns.

“I don’t understand that,” said Om. “They don’t reallybelieve I exist, but they go and put something like that on a grave.”

“It’s hard to explain. I think it’s because they believe theyexist,” said Brutha. “It’s because they’re people, and so was he.”

Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

18

verse: the shower in the place that is supposed to be home feels

just as alien as a country i’ve never been in and

the bed in the place that is supposed to be my room feels

both too small and too large as if i’m not meant to sleep in it and

every time i go back to the house i grew up in

the coffee table clutter is different and the photo on the calendar is changed and the faces of the people who raised me are a little older

verse: even basic feelings feel different now, grander and more vague

as if i’m feeling them from the end of a very long tunnel

i know that there’s so many more things i need to be doing

but it’s so much more difficult now to eat, to bathe, to care for myself at all

when i look in the mirror and the person i see isn’t the one i remember being years or months or even days ago

verse: growing up isn’t like how i thought it’d be

i knew it’d be frightening and difficult and and i’d miss what came before

but this is different somehow, somehow instead of swapping one phase of life for another

everything just got warped instead

who uprooted my home and my body and moved it all to some strange uncanny valley-esque mimic?

chorus: the leaves on the trees turned brown and red when i wasn’t there to watch and

there’s construction near my old house that wasn’t there before and

maybe things should have settled by now but they haven’t.

it feels wrong to worry about rent and food and tuition when everything is so warped.

the sonder is mixing with this great big existential weight but the world keeps moving forward anyway.