Arriving home from school, she placed her backpack on the old wooden bench in the kitchen. It creaked and complained. She sighed in return. She set to replaying the day in her mind, as she often did. It must have been something I said, she thought. Though, as usual, she had no clue what it was.

She felt most of the time as though she viewed the world through the gauzy and gossamer walls of a cocoon. And that she was perpetually at that stage between caterpillar and butterfly. Long languid days in the chrysalis when enzymes dissolve the caterpillar into a soup-like substance while its tissues, limbs, organs, and imaginal discs strategize their move to their correct positions. Yes. She was butterfly sauce. 

What was it I said this time? She bit into an apple bursting with a sweetness that washed over her tongue like cerulean blue music. Were she to describe the experience out loud, that’s exactly what she’d say.

At the sound of her sister and brother in the other room playing and laughing, she felt that familiar surge of overwhelm – bitter in her mouth like unsweetened chocolate. So she sought solace in her bedroom closet just as a nautilus retreats to the first chamber of its geometrically perfect shell. It was a place where she was free to ponder, mull, wring her hands, and gaze through the small circular window on the eastern wall. How lovely it would be if the rest of my house were as perfect as the nautilus shell, she thought. 

From the closet and the space inside her head – that cozy attic corner where she truly resided – her words flowed into the air with seamless precision. They were white-hot percussion – clear and concise. But she suspected this is not what other people experienced. Those troublesome creatures who lived outside of her head seemed to witness something more akin to an illegible sign composed of buzzing, flickering, and fading neon letters; their narrow winding tubes filled only halfway with the illuminated gas.

“Screw them,” she said and moved to a deep nook at the back of the closet. There she had carved out a her-sized spot complete with a small lamp, a pad of paper, and a set of colored pencils. She leaned against her favorite polka-dotted dress and put pencil to paper. Her body felt at ease and she moved through the gateway to an alternate world. It was a world where colors had flavors, flowers had song, and she never EVER said anything wrong.