Chaos. Never ending background music because a song is always stuck in my head. Thoughts meander like leaves in a breeze. My brain is never turning off except to sleep. Sleep is like a fog.

An ordinary summoning, she called this. Why did we choose my mind? Because she knew it would be more interesting than hers, and she didn’t want me to know all her secrets. Right. My mind has plenty of cobwebs, oh there’s the quadratic formula! Cobwebs cloud what exactly that formula solves for, maybe something involving square roots? I can’t remember. School was so long ago. I miss it, but I could live inside my mind, call it the school of the self. Isn’t that what philosophers did? Solipsism, that’s what living exclusively in my mind would involve, only I can’t because I’m not alone in here. I have to find a way out somehow. I haven’t yet. I’m tripping on words, which have real physical properties in my mind apparently.

I’m lost, and I’ve lost Talia too. She’ll probably enjoy the forest of my brain, she likes hiking, and I too am enjoying walking through pink leaves, sunlight dappled shadows. Birds chirp, woodpeckers hollow out certain trees, nesting inside my mind. Exhaustion hits like the sun setting, and the darkness sets in. The fog settles, like I’m never going to find her again, like I’m always going to stay lost here. Still, comforting numbness returns, none of what’s outside is real in my mind, just characters, Blaine Anderson and Kurt Hummel, some people are permanent high school students, and god I miss high school, I had friends back then, though never the kind of friendships shown on TV, still, rewriting the stories is how my mind occupies itself at night, when the fog sets in and the world outside doesn’t exist. Talia calls and I consider ignoring her but instead I track the sound of her voice. In my mind, my ears work perfectly, though outside one is faulty without the hearing aid and unreliable when the hearing aid is on also.

She found the cord, the pull cord my dad almost refused to pull when my mom was giving birth to me. If we pull it, we’ll be ejected, I tell her. She’s not ready to leave my mind, and I don’t blame her. We’re in a nice spot - the cast of all the TV I watched as a child are cardboard cutouts symbolizing how I played with them in my mind, my first crush waves at Talia, who tells me I had good taste back then. I did.

In a secret alternate universe, Talia occupies a similar section of real estate, but not in the version of my mind we’re traveling through. I don’t let myself think about my friends that way. Not if they’re in relationships - they are off limits, just like professors and therapists.

As though thinking about it changed the scenery, my old therapist’s office sprouts into view. The green coach I used to sit on when I was diagnosed with PTSD, when I was told what happened to me was traumatic, that the nightmares I was suffering from were actually maybe memories. Those memories are further in the fog, so I lead Talia away from this area, far from that part of the mind. She wouldn’t want to see me like that. I didn’t want to be like that, that’s part of why I’m not in therapy anymore - it’s pointless to dwell on the past.

But the past is most of my mind’s real estate, what’s not taken up by fiction and daydreams, oh Wikipedia citations are floating through the fog, wild. Maybe we should pull that cord now? I’m worried Talia will see too much and decide I’m too much like Liam and Darby and Aviva and Kevin and so many friends that no longer occupy the title anymore decided. Traffic come, oh great Liam’s here, fat and immovable and I was so bad at being their friend, our autisms clashed in opposing ways.

I never got around to outright telling Talia what happened with Liam because it would involve my brother, and Liam made it abundantly clear nobody wants to hear about my brother. Nobody wants to hear about my brother. Nobody wants to - aaaand he’s in my mind now.

“Talia, I’m pulling the cord!” Talia nodded, the wind making hearing words impossible as I yanked the cord just as my brother’s hands began… we’re just sitting on my living room couch now. My mind was chaos, and my house appears comparatively calm. “Sorry about that.”

Stifled, burning embers extinguished, spark-less, lifeless and caged

We wither away, rotting, rotting like we too are being consumed

By more than what life has thrown, by a society igniting matches

Then shouting down that we burn too brightly, stomp him out, make her cease

Fire that cannot be controlled shall be removed, taken elsewhere

To burn through centuries of kindling in far away places

And the government, they hope the smoke never seeps home

That all that remains is dust, stomped down so deep we forget what it felt like

To briefly be burning, alight, consumed by more than cast away decay

But even specks sparkle in sunlight, if the wind wafts in just right

We may float, illuminated by the source of all heat

Remembering what we could be, before the boot crushed us beneath it.

Ashes to ashes, flame begets flame, suppressing fires only makes the burn

Uncontrolled, unceasing like how one may yearn

Simply to live untethered to social niceties, to clocks

That yield and rank us too much, always creating shocks

At how young a fire can be, how kindling doesn’t need a century’s suppression

As youth carries with it one’s first oppression, the boot’s first footprint.

My parents say I’m an old soul. They’re probably right. I was accidentally invited on a birdwatching walk for senior citizens when I was university, and I went on it! I joined a knitting circle once, and everyone else there had at least twenty years on me. I’m twenty four years old right now and I feel like my soul is older, like I’ve lived more experiences than twenty four years ought to be able to hold, but perhaps that’s because I lose myself in fiction as often as I possibly can, trying to pretend I can live lives other than my own, that other souls could overlap onto mine like a Venn diagram or a kaleidoscope. Some semblance of more than humanity, of animal or vegetative souls like the sort Aristotle wrote about.

caliginous clouds of Melanoplus spretus blocked out the light not two hundred years ago

Yet that same creature has now disappeared forever, possibly caused by crushed eggs from irrigation

The world is worse now, caddisflies haunt the extinct species list on Wikipedia

Because their homes are dying, drying,

the separation between rivers and rivals, spawning and spiraling,

between what humanity owns and what we have stolen

has disappeared completely.

The electric light overhead hums in agreement that this

cursed world is wrong, humanity had wronged ecology

And yet the sound of those katydids will never be recovered, Katy-did, Katy-did

Survival of the fittest means surviving the surround sound landscape of automobiles and

I am not one of the believers in outdoor cats not causing the apocalypse

Creatures’ worlds are ending, mine just happens to not be; though I will wish sometimes that

I may go extinct instead, since my long-staring soul cannot handle so much splintering of ecosystems that were once whole

Once whole, once hole, one hole, if there’s a hole I would like to fall into it please

And maybe forget to return to reality.

What is wrong with me? Why do I feel like writing words for challenges has more likelihood of success than applying to actual jobs? Why is selling writing so much easier than filling out resume after resume? Why is writing cover letter so much more boring than writing responses to prompts? Why is asking questions more fun than answering them? Will I really try to write a novel in November? Why am I exhausted? Will I ever actually succeed at finding a way to make money despite the statistics being against me, the system of interviews and networks not meant for autistic minds to navigate through?

Hunter’s moon, like most full moons

Goes unseen by me, asleep in my bed by nightfall

Mom says I was born under a harvest moon, a full moon

The fullest moon, considering the word harvest has meaning

Northern hemisphere folks fill our bellies as the moon fills the tides

Pulling the ocean as always, in and out like inhales and exhales

Like the ocean itself breathes, the moon inflating and deflating lungs

Which evolved from swim bladders, gills, fish with names mimicking our organs

from that salty sea the moon controls. The moon controls outside

Whereas inside, I sleep, dreaming occasionally, elsewhere and

Outside of the control of this hunter moon’s gravitational pull.

It’s the high holy days, the beginning of the new year when we ask to be rewritten into the book of life and atone for the wrongdoings of the past year. I’ve always felt autumn is more of the season for the new year than January, maybe because my birthday is in it, so I have been trying to account for my many failings and flaws lately.

I haven’t felt very good about myself, although I don’t know how much of that is due to my lack of employment and reliance on my parents. I know I am supposed to honor my mother and father but when I live with them, when Mom works at home and complains I see her as a “playmate”, when Dad demands I “use my brawn” whenever anything needs lifting or dragging and sticks his nose up at the prospect of helping me out physically ever while regularly bemoaning “i’m tryin’ to help!” when it feels like pestering and nagging, it’s extremely difficult. I’m lucky I have them, I’m aware of that. I remind them that I love them often with both words and actions, Mom more often because she’s around more.

The future just looks so bright I feel like staring at the sun, risking blindness if I try for too long. I don’t want to be Not In Education Employment or Training (a NEET, the discord server I’m in calls us) through the twenty fourth year of my life but I don’t want to work at a job I’ll hate even though that’s probably a rite of passage. I don’t know what I’m doing. Half the time I don’t feel like I’m doing anything but wasting time on Reddit or writing words very few people will read.

Being Jewish is scary in a world where Israel is bombing multiple countries and everyone has always and will always associate Israel with Jews. My neighbors have children in Israel, can you keep them safe at least? I know that part of the world is not exactly easy for you to enact influence, what with free will being such a human right you’ve given us and propaganda having infected generations of citizens, so I’m just going to contain that part of this prayer to selfishness. Keep my cousins and neighbor’s kids alive.

May we beat the weapons of war into ploughshares and don’t stop. Keeping beating them into musical instruments! May whoever next attempts to wage war have to beat them back into ploughshares first. That was a poem in the Siddur I memorized as a child and still agree with.

Thank you for letting me live in a world where the beauty of nature still exists, even amidst civilization. Seeing the viceroy butterflies and bumblebees and every creature that could possibly live on a goldenrod this summer has helped keep me sane. Even witnessing death and then life reborn from death has been beautiful, like when the ant colony was dragging a dragonfly a hundred times its size across the sidewalk and I not only had the chance to see it but to video it for others on YouTube to see as well. People liked it! People also disliked it, but still, I brought joy to someone who otherwise wouldn’t have been as happy. Maybe.

Please let me live to eat apples and honey again next year. Thank you, amen.

The universe where I was born on time: January 2001 rather than October 2000. My childhood would not have been spent almost a quarter of the time in hospitals. I would have been in a different class in school, the year beneath what I was in this universe, so the specifics of my childhood would be different: different friends, different enemies, maybe different teachers. The neighborhood dynamics would have been different growing up too, a year younger than the other kids - they would not know me as well. Maybe I’d seem less strange that way. Maybe my mom would have kept her fellow mom-friends from the neighborhood after I started Kindergarten in that universe. Then again, my older brother was more of why my mom had been outcast than I was.

There’s the parallel universe my parents sometimes bring up, where my older brother was born normal, rather than cognitively impaired. They think he would have been a salesperson, an entrepreneur, maybe a computer geek or an actor - he loves movies, so the possibilities of what he could have done with that had he been neurotypical are plentiful. I would have lived with him until I was twelve rather than him leaving home when I was four the way he had in this universe.

Maybe I would have still been a singleton in another universe, or maybe I’d go to the universe where my mom was able to have both twins - we would have to be born on time to have any chance of survival, but having a twin brother would severely change who that baby girl that I once was grew up to be. Maybe I wouldn’t be transgender. Maybe she would stare at me, unable to recognize herself from this alternate universe, unable to reconcile such a singular weirdo with her healthy, birthday-in-January, born-as-a-package-deal self.

There would be parallel universes without alternate versions of my life at all - ones where my mom married the rabbi she dated before my dad, or never left Michigan for her Master’s degree, one where my dad’s parents never left Montreal, one where he never left Missouri or journalism, or never moved to Boston after law school, many universes where my parents never befriended the couple that had set them up or simply never made it to the blind date where they had met, or where they fell out of touch after…

Millions of universes without my life exist - the more difficult part would be finding my life within parallel universes, considering how many events were required before my birth would even be possible. I imagine the technology to enter parallel universes would include some way to search out your life, out of the billions of lives in existence - maybe sorted alphabetically and chronologically?

Perhaps one would be able to filter what year they want to see, so I could start with the alternate universes involving my birth in 2000 and then move backwards to universes involving my brother as child, and so on, exploring further and further into history until I'm not even exploring my life in a parallel universe anymore but just time travelling! Or maybe the technology would require an anchor, oneself or a relative to tie the universes together so the fabric fails to fall apart. That would make more sense.

The sky rippled in reflection of the flowing stream, where caddisflies anchored themselves to dead leaves, sticks, and various other debris, only moving to reveal their presence when disturbed by non-current motions, like the frog returning to the moisture, slapping the surface as it reentered. The frog’s return jostled the caddisflies away from their larger hiding spots, but the fear of predation kept them momentarily still. They then retreated to cover, to their own nutritional duty of filtering the stream for edible algae.

A snail used its foot to slither across the pebble-filled bottom, searching for its own feast of chlorophyll in the watery ecosystem, or perhaps a fellow mollusk to entangle its slime trail with, slither body along body as their mucus merged, bodies merging as one of the couple unsheathed a love dart and stabbed the other. This snail was far from alone, and indeed, slithered upon another snail's shell, signaling interest.

Unbeknownst to the couple beginning their mating ritual on the bottom of the stream, the sky that had been reflected earlier was beginning to pour the condensed contents of its clouds back into the environment, rain falling into the existing flow of water. The puddles that formed would eventually also merge into the water, unless they evaporated.

There appears to have been a struggle. The struggle’s specifics cannot be discerned currently, but someone has died. Their death was determined by the presence of blood and bone fragments at scene of the crime. The species of the bone fragments cannot be determined currently, but something with vertebrae died, or was crushed somehow, which is unlikely to have occurred without death or serious disfigurement of the spinal column. Serious disfigurement of the spinal column typically results in death, at least in all known vertebrate organisms on Earth.

Was it possible that the struggle occurred off-planet? No known organisms currently containing bones can be found anywhere other than Earth, but it is impossible to rule out the possibility that alien time travel could have been involved in the struggle. Then again, the vast majority of struggles involving blood and bone fragments occur on Earth, with known species as the combatants. Yet the blood has not been tested to discern the specific species, nor have the bone fragments been tested for DNA. Therefore alien or off-planet interference cannot be conclusively ruled out as intervening factors in the yet-still-unspecified struggle. Further reporting may be forthcoming following an actual investigation of the scene.