Welcome to My Mind

I stepped on a swing and it swung me away.

At some point, in the middle of an eternal momentum, there was a ripple in time that graced my face. Wind turned to fabric and the night to day.

My second foot swayed forward until it met with peach-tinted water hanging far above my world at a 90 degree angle. It was beautiful, like a flower that melted into a transparent ocean. It held my foot in place as I held the swing’s chain, like the magnet of mercury or the muck of mud - beautiful, glassy, fluttering mud.

A giraffe’s head surfaced from the water. It wore water goggles. Its neck was surfacing too, higher and higher, it grew, until up came its back and a spikey-haired boy that sat on it. He, too, wore goggles.

“You’re a long ways from home.” ...said the giraffe. His head craning down beside me. “You were unwise to visit this place.”

And like that, his warning became a sentence to my fate, for the boy on his back took that moment to jump out of the flower-water, off of the giraffe's back, and on to the swing. In one fluid motion, he slipped my foot off the seat with his, and pried my hand off the chain with his. As he started to fall away, he whispered a faint "Gracias" with a pained expression on his face. He lifted his arm and a long patterned sleeve that wasn't there before flung up towards my face, from this came a pomegranate that I juggled to catch. Every fumble sent this water-glazed world at a different angle, as if the pomegranate was the centre of the universe and we were rotating around it.

When I last caught it, this world was upside down and I was viewing the final sillhouette of the boy who stole my swing as he fell through the clouds. I hugged the pomegranate to my heart and for some reason I began to cry. My tears caused the ocean I was attached to fall out of the sky and rain down on my old world. I watched, completely drenched, as the ocean and all its talking zoo-animals, fell away from me, without me. All that was left for company was this pomegranate...

...and it didn't come with an instructions manual.