I am who many people are: a person quite comfortable in their time zone, with a soul lodged inside of me somewhere, woven through my rib cage maybe if you want to believe that. When people tell me I am special I cry because it is not true and I am also hormonal. That’s what they tell me anyway, that hormones can sometimes feel like an invasive species. The days that pass by feel like an incision more than anything else, equally exhaustive as the last but more spilling, stretched, angular. I learned that the universe was constantly expanding in a tiny portable classroom and everything has been off since. I was wearing sketchers. It felt like the wrong time to learn something like that. That secret came out of an old man’s mouth, a substitute teacher, his lips nearly the same color of his face and his saliva like watery glue. The universe is growing, like all of you, he said, gesturing. It all felt doomed in a lot of different ways. The next week the substitute teacher was gone and we watched a video of a birth. Everyone shielded their eyes. The portable would never move as promised and, as we got older, this made more and more sense to us.
