Every single goddamn person is a lawyer.

The trees have ears and the buildings are probably haunted.
The husk of an old bank from the 1930s is now an Apple store.
The old world sits next to a parking lot, and the graves of the eighteen hundreds sit next to people killed in vain. The puritans would have a riot if they saw what we did to the Charter state.

The school I spent six years of my life at used to be a synagogue. Now it’s nothing.
My middle school waits next to a field with a well more important to our history than I Love Lucy made it out to be. The minutemen stashed guns there during the revolution. Now it’s coated in a thick layer of grass clippings.

Geriatric professors recognize my sister with a distant and far off look, saying that they taught her once, and she was very well behaved.
No one knows who they are.
No one remembers me either. Old classmates whose names have long since vanished don’t remember who I was. We lived in the same classrooms for six years. It’s a blessing in disguise.
At least store attendants tell my mom I’m a polite young man. She doesn’t believe it. I hope to one day.

They rearranged the CVS near my old house in the shopping center, the one I haven’t been to since we moved. I don’t know where the bandaids are anymore. It scares me.

Going ‘home’ isn’t peaceful. I live as the former person who was never really there for brief stretches at a time.
‘She’ never liked it there either. The girl who wasn’t there.
She thought it was empty. And sad.
Like Cameron from Ferris Buller. Ours isn’t a art museum despite moms best efforts.
It’s a mausoleum. It’s dedicated to people I will never meet, and the ones I wish I never had.

It’s always cold. I wear shorts now once it hits the mid-thirties, that’s spring in our false world.
It snows in April. It snowed in June one year.
Screams echo through the woods in the dead of night. It’s the foxes. It’s always the foxes.

The cemeteries are so common that once I had a dream I wandered through one. I lingered too long, and saw my own name on the stone. I brought a sledgehammer. My false tombstone rots with the flowers no-one left.
Decay floats through the ever-present fog.

‘Did you see the game last night?’ There was no baseball game. I lie anyway. We stare at the Sound together through the mist and watch a goliathan boat pass by the horizon. It seems to go through the lighthouse on the sandbar. Lovecraftian beasts wait for me to set the catamaran on the water. I will not be the first to go missing at sea.

The world is so vast here. Time doesn’t pass, it merely lurks. The sun rises bright, and stays blazing until I turn my back for a moment, eager to catch the moth that sits on my windowsill, and by the time I return, the night has come. I don’t see the moon. I can’t see the stars either.