human by Janice Lin (17, California)

​Sometimes when people speak their words make no sense. You hear what they are saying. You
know what they are saying. You understand. It doesn’t make sense.
​
Sometimes your words don’t make sense either. They crowd up your spine in a stream too fast
to recognize, jam up the insides of your brain until the words tangle on the grooves and ridges
along the letters. With steady fingers you pull them apart. You think you know what it means.
You open your mouth and the knot of words tumble out and scatter.

---

Sometimes you think that the world is strange. The people are speaking a language beyond your understanding. The world is speaking a language beyond your understanding. Their word for "earth" carries a red-rimmed halo of light, but no one pays it heed. Because this is us—humanity, buried under a thousand tongues and united in the one you have never understood.  

Are you us?

You say you understand. They lodge a clutter of words in your chest and they slide back down your spine to the base of your stomach. The tangle settles there and burns, carries its fragments up your throat. Are there letters in any other means? It doesn't make sense. 

The world is strange. They all seem to know something you don't. You want to ask but the words don't come to you. How do you ask an unknowable question? You don't. Perhaps they are all awake and you are dreaming, or perhaps they are the dreamers. It is dangerous to jostle an illusion stitched together by fragile thread. This reality settles in the bodies of the people until it fractures all that oppose it. Do not disturb the inexorable.

The world is strange but sometimes you are stranger. 2You become the provocation they don't understand.

​You cannot belong here.