1. This isn’t my home planet.
At four (4) years old you slide fully conscious into your body. At five (5) you start trying to master your body: you toddle, you jump, you chew. At six (6) you start feeling unsettled inside your body. At seven (7) someone finally deigns to tell you that you are the unsettling one. At eight (8) things start falling into place. At nine (9) you learn how to masturbate. At ten (10) your classmates close ranks to exclude you. At eleven (11) you start shooting arrows back. At twelve (12) you move away from home. At thirteen (13) you start getting migraines. At fourteen (14) you start fucking around. At fifteen (15) you relearn how to be nice. At sixteen (16) you lose your mind. At seventeen (17) you ruin everything, completely, comprehensively. At eighteen (18) you get your mind back. At nineteen (19) you try your best. At twenty (20) you somehow find it in yourself to keep trying. Twenty (20) and you try so hard, you try the hardest, but god it just keeps getting harder to walk, to breathe, to toddle, jump, and chew. Twenty (20) and it feels like you’re getting chopped up into pieces. The unsettled feeling, the one that’s never left you, travels in tremors up and down your arms and legs. The migraines grow stronger and more frequent. The tips of your fingers are always numb. At twenty-one (21) you realize: you don’t belong here. Maybe you never did.
2. So how do I get off?
You are reasonable. Reason is and has always been your best friend, your mentor and confidante and spouse and child, despite everything. Working against the strength of your conviction, you find it in yourself to start small. You buy a radio. You watch documentaries. You talk to someone who knows a little bit more than you. They tell you: Copernicus, Galilei, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, Sagan, Hawking, Tyson. You browse Wikipedia and popular science magazines. You get stuck on Fermi—Where is everybody?—and you try to broadcast a signal of your own. I am here, you say. Here I am, you say. Your radio set-up gets more elaborate. Your room gets more oppressive. But still you are reasonable. You make only reasonable demands. If anyone is listening, please stop by. It is beautiful here, well worth seeing. But I don’t belong. It was beautiful and I didn’t belong, it was beautiful when I didn’t belong, it was beautiful because I didn’t belong. Everything. Anything. So. Please visit. And when you leave, won’t you please take me with you?
3. Where am I? Where am I really from?
Marrow then bone then muscle then skin, then T-shirt and shorts and socks—then bedsheet then mattress then bedframe, then tile then concrete and steel and earth—in a house on a street in a subdivision in a barangay in a district in a city in a province on an island in a country in a continent—on a great slab of crust on a mantle. It sounds so simple when broken down. And by all accounts you do blend in: by now you’ve learned to slide all over the place, you’ve learned a soft posture and a soft voice and an eye-contact system that works. All these years later you think: finally, I’ve figured out how to be inside the shell of the tortoise by the time the arrows start flying. But this doesn’t change your heart, the lightbulb inside flickering sparking cracking, your reason thinning and spiderwebbing under the weight of that same conviction. You: devout atheist, idiot scholar, spineless snake—you somehow find it in yourself to declare that against all odds there exists a planetfull of people like you, who like you, stadiums upon stadiums of a people who understand, who don’t find you unsettling and who you don’t find unsettling. You start seeing it in dream, in painful visions. An orange sky, a rounded landscape, the architecture familiar and comforting. Everything you touch there touches you back: the film over the world is peeled off, and there you can feel the whorls on the tip of your fingers when you stroke them over someone else’s skin, and in dream you can see the whorls themselves finally crack open, the thin indentations resolving into the shape of a language you spent your whole life looking to read, and here it is, and it tells you—
4. Where am I really going?
When you were a kid you didn’t know or care about aliens or space; it was all about the Romans with you. You talked about it all the time. Not even the mythology, not really; more the aesthetic, the structures. You thought of yourself toga-clad on the steps of a forum, speaking your truth, which of course is the absolute unassailable truth, and here lies the actual fantasy: in Rome they are listening to you, in Rome they clap and cheer. In Rome they band together, in Rome no one gets left behind, or something equally inane, equally ahistorical. Look at the tortoise! Look how protective, how protected. With this little bit of childhood creativity keeping you afloat through high school and college and beyond, it takes you the longest time to admit the Romans wouldn’t have liked you at all either. They would’ve not liked you the most.
5. I don’t belong anywhere.
You talk to someone who knows a little bit less than you and find your first believer. From there you snag a second, a third, a fourth, and so on. Every meeting you peer at them closely, you try to find the common ground, your common ancestry. But here you are introduced to people more unsettling than you, and it disturbs you that you are disturbed. You are disturbed, annoyed, exasperated, but still you are hopeful, and still you declare: stadiums, planets, oranges, whorls. You give comfort where you can. You deal in hopes and expectations and promises. Rooms fill. Rooms grow more oppressive. You keep running out of chairs. Your tremors stop, then start, then stop again. The hopes and expectations drive you to more outlandish promises. Why not? Fuck it. You say December, you say solstice, you say light, you say beam, you say homecoming, you say glorious return. So you and all your people, the people who claim they’re your people, you camp out on a pasture and wait. And your skin is thrumming, electricity crackling through a thousand additional veins, and everybody can hear it when you talk. At the apex of the night, everybody tilts their heads skyward, looking for their ride. And you: you look at all your people laid down to roost under blankets and tents and canopies, a sea, a stadium’s worth of people who know just a little bit or a lot less than you, and they sit there across from you, staring expectantly, and you don’t know these faces at all. You don’t find anything of yourself within them, even though you know there should be something, even though you put something there yourself. You can’t find it. This roiling mass of people and you can’t find it. And right then you get hit by lightning. You receive a new set of orders, divine revelation, knocked out in Morse code from the inside of your skull, and it says: all these years later and you are still outside the fucking tortoise.
6. I’m going to die here.
Things dissolve, as they do. All told you don’t actually suffer any meaningful consequence. You are given a choice—Would you rather be called crazy or evil?—and you say, I believe the term is unsettling. You emancipate yourself from Reason and lean in hard. What did you tell them that for? Oh, I just felt like it. Where did you even get these ideas from? Oh, I’m always reading The New York Times cover-to-cover. Is it still going to arrive? Oh, I’ll have to double-check my calendar. Did you ever believe in anything you were saying? Oh, without a doubt. Without a single doubt.
7. That isn’t so bad.
That first believer comes by, shows up with wet patches on his jeans right over the knees like the ghost of something past. He cracks his neck, massages the back, and he manages to look up at you, though he’s taller. And he says, I still believe you, in you, even though you got it wrong.
And you find something within yourself: a small pearl of desire, almost completely forgotten about, crusted over millions upon millions of times, a single pearl borne of a single thought: I want someone to believe in me even when I get things wrong.
And it helps, and heals, and spreads. And so you finally are able to screw the last spare lightbulb in, you find it within yourself to leave Reason an apologetic voicemail, and you say to your first believer, I am sorry, but I no longer believe any of us are coming home. Once you have the thing you want it’s the easiest thing in the world to break it into pieces. This is all there is. This is what we’ve got. So it goes. You broke everything. As your eternal reward, you are permanently locked inside a box of panes of glass, an unbroken shell, away from shields, swords, arrows, whatever. Unable to touch anything, unable to ever make first or final contact. So it goes.
How it goes: he grasps your arm, and he says, Oh, yeah, okay. And maybe he touched your cheek, and he says, can I stay here anyway?
You ask, do you find me unsettling? And he says, no more or less than I do anyone else.
8. This is nice.
Maybe you turn twenty-two (22). It peeks from just around corners. Twenty-five (25) laughs, bright and airy, an echo from somewhere else. Thirty (30) is rubbing its eyes, thinking of getting out of bed. Thirty-five (35) dreams a dream that looks like now. Forty (40) is in scattered atoms across the night. And on and on and on. You were born here. You grew up here. So it goes. So it keeps going. Despite best efforts, you’re going to die here. So! it! goes! It sounds so simple, doesn’t it, broken down like this? I’m sorry for waiting this long to tell you, but the only secret is this: Just turn around. You’ll finally see everybody—we’re all just waiting for you, sprawled across these pastures, here and now in the there and then.
Zoe Adrien Lapa is a microblogger first and an author second. You can find their work on Tumblr via @hotknifebutter or in places like ALOCASIA, NECKSNAP Magazine, and elsewhere.