You believe your child is missing. You notify the authorities. They investigate, there is no suspect, in fact all of the agents assigned to the case believe that your child is actually not missing at all, that you should look harder and you will discover that your child is actually alive and well in the house sleeping.

Meanwhile, without any proof, the police chief calls to tell you he is sure that your next door neighbor has kidnapped your child, not because this is true, because he is faced with a mandatory retirement next week and for his own personal gain he desires to be seen as a hero for solving the case, believing he will be asked to stay on the job for another four years. In fact he had been spreading false rumors for months around the community that children were being kidnapped for the sole purpose of promoting himself claiming unapologetically to all the frightened parents, “Only I alone can fix this.”

Based on this lie, you decide to confront your neighbor yourself who denies all culpability because he is telling you the truth.

You become enraged at his denial. You go back to your house, you get a gun, you head back to the neighbor’s house, hold the gun to his head and shoot.

Who is guilty?

When we wake up, we choose the side of the bed to get out on. We go about our days uninterrupted, for our cells are still dividing. It’s a headache to work, more of a headache to have no daily routine. When we go to bed, we choose the moment the light goes out. But in reality we don’t get to choose that moment. Destiny is decided for us, and our thoughts are just distracting us from it. Our lives shift as the universe expands.

Poetry is like bleeding, and the only bandaid is recognition. Someone who had once been addicted told me, you can have someone bring you out of the darkness, but that does not mean they will be your light. I didn’t cry. I only understood.

In the moment we enter the rabbit hole, it is too late. We have already surrendered. For me, this used to be facilities where women cried and avoided eye contact. Now it is the blank screen, the only place I can scream without paying medical bills that will lead me to bankruptcy.

All this is to say, perhaps I possess too little self awareness to understand that I will never leave the rabbit hole. Or perhaps I am too complacent. I got out of the bed on the right side this morning. Nothing wraps up perfectly, and I am already gone, hopefully a speck of light in someone else’s darkness.

Spiraling.

I’m spiraling and I can’t stop.

I can’t stop searching for what I need.

It’s never enough.

Fuck.

It’s never enough.

I roll down my car window

and let the fresh air whip around the metal walls.

It’s overwhelming,

but damn,

does the fresh air feel nice.

It’s distracting,

if only for a minute or two,

from my goal of this drive:

to find the stopper to my madness--

my downward dive--

so out of control.

I can feel myself spiraling.

He was never the husband type. Our first date had ended with us face down in dirt, giggling our noses red. The first ring he ever gave me was made of twigs and leaves, intertwined with grass and specs of dirt. He slipped it on my finger, leaving traces of wilderness through my hair and clothes. Our meals were often wild berries and delicate leaves, which he picked off at sun rise with the morning dew still clinging on. Well, his meals. But sometimes I’d steal a fruit or two.

As I bite down on the berries, the juices would spill onto my lips. Almost like blood, it’d immediately stain my lips and trickle down my neck.

“You look sweet.” He’d say, a little awkwardly. As if to make up for the comment, he’d then lean in for a kiss. When he pulled away, I often wondered if my cheeks were the same rouge as his lips.

We met in spring, and summer soon followed. It was too hot in Wisconsin to play, so we’d doze off in the shades under the trees. Sunlight would flicker through the leaves, leaving spotted golden highlights on us. It was then I had started calling him a little nickname. Mister Rabbit.

Full of nature, innocence, and life. Whenever I called him so, he’d reply by tapping me on the nose. I had always secretly hoped he’d call me his Mrs Rabbit, but I had time. I could wait.

I knew that the harsh life of modernity never suited him. Screens were strings, as concrete was obsolete; songs must come from birds, never CDs or record players. He had explained it to me with a twinkle in his eye. This was the same twinkle in his eye when he was at a loss for words, as he was awkward in the dorky way. The same twinkle when slang slips from my vocabulary. He was proud to be different. Being an outcast was never something he took shame in.

He would try and be romantic, recite the poems scribbled on rocks with charcoal, but fail as he could never place the right words in his sentences. My Mister Rabbit would then look at me and tell me to stay in school, to not be like him. It was summer, and I was in my twenties, I’d remind him. He’d make another joke or so, brush off the accident. I had realized then that he no longer understood anything of the life outside his forest.

We met through his mother, who I met at work. I had graduated for many years, but my Mister Rabbit didn’t understand that, and I had never cared to explain. The old woman, fragile and delicate, was always the tough ball in the care home. She wouldn’t stay still. Broken bones never swayed her climbing trees. She didn’t know how to read, and didn’t want to learn. I would climb up the branches with her, and she’d smile at me like we were childhood friends on the town’s playground, grinning about some prank we would pull soon. I liked her. She knew when to look, and when to look away. We were fast friends.

In the winter, she stopped climbing trees. It was cold, she said. But we both knew the real reason. Days later, she stopped breathing. Before she did, she had asked me to go see her son. When I asked for his whereabouts, shame flushed her voice. She stumbled over her words, like a little girl who had lied stealing the last piece of candy. She had lost him, she said. With my questioning gaze, she revealed that she was once married.

Marriage was just not for her. She wanted to do whatever it was she pleased, and a son and a husband tied her down. So she ran away. She thought that she would go back weeks later, and nothing would have changed. It obviously didn’t go that way, she said quite bitterly. The young one couldn’t sit still. He ran too. In her husband’s eyes, she was a cheating whore, and so he left too. And thus, she returned to an empty little hut, with the fireplace cold for a long, long, time.

I eventually tracked him down, near a camping site yards away from Main Street. When I saw the way his hair messily tumbled down his shoulders, I lost the words I had originally planned. “Do you want to go on a date?” I had asked, completely forgetting what I was there for. That was how I met my Mister Rabbit.

Fall came. When he had once again asked me about school, I made up my mind. I would bring him into my world. I was sick of parking tickets beside the river. The next time I saw him preparing logs, I stopped him.

“Winter is harsh.” He said, unsure of why I had interrupted an important routine. “We need them.”

I explained how heaters work. The impatience in his eyes were obvious. He clearly still rejected the idea of returning to society. I pleaded and begged, and even threatened to leave. He wouldn’t budge.

The leaves on the trees went from green to yellow, yellow to orange, orange to rouge, and rouge to dead. Like us, I’d think. I thought that was the end of us. The hut we stayed in were often filled with dreadful silence. He refused to talk to me, as anything I said would be about leaving the forest. The night before the first snow, I cried.

“I want to be your Mrs Rabbit.” I said.

Through my tears, I saw him sit beside the fire, expressionless. “I love you.” I said. I didn’t get a response.

The snow fell the morning after. When I woke up, I realized that he had left. No logs. No fire. How would he survive? Eventually, I left the hut and went back to my normal routine. I had fallen into a strange rabbit hole, I told the ones who asked. People have doubts when you disappear after work and never have time to visit. No one believed me, but I knew what had happened, that was enough.

Weeks later, I saw him at a dinner party. You can imagine my shock. His hair was shorter, with glasses and a suit. When I saw him, I think I had almost weeped tears of joy. Before I saw the woman beside him with matching rings, that was.

I was confused and very much heartbroken. If he was willing to leave his forest, why for her and not me? If he was willing to marry her and be tied down with bounds of marriage, why for her and not me? He had glanced over in my direction, then smiled at me.

The rest was a bit of a blur. I don’t quite remember much with all the blood and screaming. But when I brought him back to my apartment, I had realized my mistake. This wasn’t my Mister Rabbit. He didn’t smell of grass and berries, nor campfire and morning dew. He was afraid of me, too. My Mister Rabbit was never afraid of me. When I brought back game, he’d tell me I did a good job. Albeit he never shared my meals with me, but he understood the cruelty of nature and what I had to do.

I had the wrong person. But how did I mistake another man for my love? I was quite disappointed, and had my dinner resentfully.

Eventually, I found him. He was in the little hut his mother left him in. When I went inside, he was clearly glad to see me despite not showing it. He even put food in the freezer for me. The meat was frozen, but I wasn’t one to complain.

a seam is ripped in the earth

and my soul goes tumbling through

this is a place of memories-

ones that i chose to forget,

woven with love and loss and regret.

storms rage and silence tumbles

through sheets a plastic and glitter and glass

a scream, a sob, a crash-

it ends and begins

then starts again

time turns to shards of water

falling in a rain

of icy drops

an infinite ribbon

that should just stop-

i'm done.

i'm finished.

this isn't what i want

anymore-

and then

i fall

and crumble

and break

on the

floor.

It happened when I was little

And even now it makes me giggle

I fell through a rabbit hole

But found not a rabbit but a mole

The mole was black with a white star in his head

When he saw me he turned and ran to bed

But I was faster, I caught him in no time

I gave him a bit of thyme

After a moment he recovered from his shock

And he already found the entrance to block

Suddenly he froze

Like an idea in his head rose

We sat down for dinner

He said he was nice in inner

He made me raspberry cream

And I woke up from my dream

Another wave breaks on the shore of mankind's greatest longing. A wave of resonance, as the fractal elements of the outer world fold in on themselves, annihilating the dissonance of matter into an expansive harmony of energy. The beating of the eternal heart, the standing wave of time, of which we are only half-conscious, promises mankind a backwards-awakening - the realization of negative time.

From our precarious perch in the positive timeline, we see a causal framework based on the monotony of time. We never stop to consider whether this time might be in harmony with itself, with it's opposite. A fish never knows what air's like until it crosses the surface - it can only observe the effects of that air on the water, which also confuses it about the nature of water.

Clarity is to be found in infinity, the infinite occilations of time, what we all unconsciously know.

she feels like alice

falling down the rabbit hole~

straight into insanity~

into the dark and unknown~

just certain that~

whatever phantasies await

she’ll have to face alone.

because after all

they’re in her head~

and everyone’s head

is their own.

and it’s never off

but always on~

spinning, taking her down

{the rabbit hole}.

I refuse to fall through that rabbit hole. I need not for my brain to whisper and taunt my soul about how pointless it is to even write these words. It is crucial that I stay in my lane; yet, I glance over at the brilliance of others - others who are so much more articulate and worthwhile than I could ever be.

No! I will not second, triple, or a million times guess myself – not this time. No longer will I allow myself to entertain such insecurities. I will power through.

What fleeting lies! Savagely, the thoughts of my inadequacies are the loudest; therefore, I know them to be true. These meanderings of my mind smother me and are confirmation that I should stay frozen in order to remain invisible to my own judgment’s headlights.

Enough! I must silence my brain. I refuse to fall through that rabbit hole – despite the fact that, as always, I just did.