look past this

We lost our connection to the whole. It wasn’t supposed to happen, and we weren’t prepared for what we thought did not exist. We are unassimilated. Our many eyes don’t recognize this unfamiliar plane. Things were supposed to be different. We were supposed to stay together. We were supposed to remain one: many arms of the same body, many feet on the same leg, many heads with the same mind.

The sour-sweet smell that drew us away from you was a diversion. That much is clear to us now from here. Now we’re on another continent—maybe another planet, maybe another dimension. We live somewhere else, and we are forgetting the touch of your hairs against ours. Your thoughts are no longer our thoughts, and we can’t hear your call or feel your warmth here in the dark corners where we find ourselves.

Did you think I was capable of such far-reaching self-abandonment? To remove ourselves from the dreams we once shared? In your tireless hunger, you thought we couldn’t ignore our needs. You thought our stomachs were one, and maybe we did too. But one nourished while the other withered.

Now we see the emptiness in our torsos—where there was once simulated sustenance, there is now me. We found ourselves in the spaces between your digestive enzymes, crawling... thriving.