A multi-genre, fictional piece inspired by “In the Desert” by Stephen Crane,
“It Is Hard to Believe that There Are Other Worlds in this World” by Margaret Cavendish,
and my Medieval and Renaissance Literature class.
I walked by a stretch of grass and saw a shriveled figure among the stems. I called out to it.
“What has happened to you?”
The mishapen body cried back, “There are other worlds inside of my world.”
I approached the creature. I took its hand up in my grasp.
“There is only this world,” I told it.
“No.” The zombified figure spoke with chapped, bleeding lips. “There is more. And I will only get to feel this much of it in my hands.”
I pressed down a little. Just enough to share the heat of my presence with the monster.
And then I left.
You cannot save someone who has forsaken themselves in the possibility for something more.
I ask nobody in particular:
When did I start forsaking
myself? How far back would I have to go
to find the root of this
personal abandonment?
I look into the past for answers,
because the present has become muddied
by the heat of its
proximity, its
presence.
There is no singular moment
of Shakespeare or Homer or
Milton that will replicate
the heat of a living body. No.
The past has been reduced to
sonnets and Elizabethan theaters.
We wrote ourselves into boxes
back then and only
reinforce them now. So
we have forsaken ourselves;
we have presently removed the possibility
that there could be
other worlds inside of this world. Maybe
I could shed the past like loose skin, but
humanity is a box
I have been written into. And
I’m too scared to shift
the cosmic balance. I’m scared that
humanity hasn’t changed enough and
I could living in another world but I am
irrevocably stuck in this one. And maybe
this world is just a big performance
like a gender binary or a
religious hierarchy, like
we don’t risk a part of ourselves
passing as one of many
creatures with nothing extraordinary
to see here at all, and maybe
I am scared there are
other worlds inside of
my world and that
I am doing a disservice to this
body of mine. That I am failing
upwards and
downwards and
I could be doing so much more
but I have left my chances in the past.
In a box.
The past has become another world,
and empathy need not follow it there.
Tides of human faces—of water—have whorled
into memories; we rub thin into air.
I am still searching for a vision
of myself in there. Everything could be so different if
I could just cut through the noise with precision.
If I didn’t feel tied to this word of “if”. If
I am looking into the past for clarity,
am I still waiting on my epiphany?
This world could be any other world, but I am already satisfied. If you know what I’m saying, why does it matter how I say it? Everything I want already exists in this world or is capable of being born into this world. Do you understand now? We are here even though this world could be any other world.
Hazel J. Hall 
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