Though I'm skilled at recognizing where my reality sometimes departs from the shared perception, experiencing an unshared reality is lonely. Sometimes I wrote it off as sleep deprivation. Sometimes I thought I was going crazy,—the insidious, unhinged-student, Bell Jar crazy. And sometimes I considered the possibility that there are multiple realities, and I am caught on the cusp: living in one, sensing another.

When you do not like what your eyes see…scoop them out with a spoon.

During a year of isolation, I come to realize that this insurmountable alterity I've felt my whole life---hasn't lately been around to feel.

but such signs are difficult to read when you’re driving so fast down a country road that you catch air going over hills while hay-heat smoke surges through your open windows & lifts you up to the ceiling & swallows the space between you & the seat, & you can feel spaces—every gap has a pull to it, pulls you toward all things—& you are like the smoke between them all, & you can feel far-off wildfires spiraling up cedars, licking dry bark, & you can feel the urgency of the hay balers, feel the car pulled back down to sweat-beaded pavement, & it’s only been a second, but when each second sings with the whole of the universe, how the hell are you supposed to read signs?

While my younger sister poses in front of Rothkos on her brief recess from a jostling lurch through the white-walled American wing / , whose plaques admit no mistake, / I read a different room. I read, beside “Seascape with Three Boats” / , each ship a beige word curled over stunning blue, / that the calligram, an abstraction of Islamic calligraphic scripts, “occurred well before the advent of twentieth century Western modernism...and continues to this today.”