No one will come to your party. Not a single soul.

You’ll trip, you’ll fall. They’ll laugh – hands conspiratorially cupped around their lip glossed mouths, as if sharing a delicious secret.

The thing you’ve been counting on, hoping against hope for, was never possible to begin with.

It seems your house is, brick by brick, quietly disintegrating around you.

Your heart will be broken.

Your heart is broken.

And your heart will be broken again.

But in you, whole worlds, whole lifetimes, are exploding into being and passing away. Babies being born, beet red and screaming, and men screaming as they die – consumed by fire, or frothing, windswept seas, or rice paper-winged dragons. There, giant snowflakes pirouette through the sky of a blazing hot August noon in 1975, where your mother, forever young, still stands in the doorway of your childhood home smiling, her eyes full of wonder. And in the dark woods – the one you made specially for storybooks and fairy tales – listen as the soft din of firefly wings swells into a string orchestra, their luminescent bodies flashing pulses of morse code, calling out the letters of your secret name.