It's time to get a washington license

I really do feel like something is glazing the glass of my outlook. Am I really here? Like a pair of glasses I chose to put on awhile ago got clouded by a whole crowd of fingerprints only some of them mine. But clouded is too soft and too natural. It’s more like if the glass itself has layers that move independently and each has to be in position for life to be what it is meant to be. Someone tugged at a couple of the layers and they’re prism-ed and kaleidascope-d now like water and surreal dreams. Just weird enough so that I know it isn’t right but can’t explain how. The subtlest fun house mirror.

Possibly the alternate universe me with correct glass layers still lives in the yellow house at the top of the hill. I used to drive past her and wave. The portal to her is as easy as the vision testing machine at the eye doctor that slips new lenses into place while the doc says which one’s better, one or two. Soft click between blurry and less blurry, clear and more clear. Click correct and suddenly I’m ocean bound, island well. I live there and I see the moon everyday and fish are my friends. If the glass is layered wrong there it doesn’t matter maybe because I’m sweating and swimming and there’s no difference between water and air and blurry and clear.

I’m actually half turtle and half cresting wave and half super constellation

And half flower floating and half moon shadow on the seafloor.

And I eat avocados and fish and track sand into my bed.

I live with rats and cockroaches and a mean cat

And frogs sing in the dark. 

It’s not even that I want to be her in that alt space. I don’t mean to romanticize the volcano that calmed the ocean just long enough for me to swim back through the break. Volcano me isn’t the right one either. She has her torso out to the sun and she relishes in attention and she grows up to be caked in flour at 4am. Angry as a puffer fish and solitary in a purple room. But she didn’t dream about things being wrong. She was welcomed to exit by sudden calm and convenient logistics and she was sure she’d return. The decision to go forked me from her. She stayed and I left. The day I flew the fishhook in the sky curved like my scorpion moon and I wept while the plane pulled me up from the homeshore.