They don’t really tell you
what the wormhole will feel like.
The tunnels of your mind,
when you start to explore them.
One day,
you just start digging.
Next, you’ve traveled through space
and time, a child again.
That day,
you’ll look down,
your fingernails covered
in the richest shades of earth.
The following day, underneath the free edge
of your once-clean nails,
shades of moist black soil
whose nutrients grow
the deepest roots
to tallest trees you’ve ever climbed.
Another day, you’re falling asleep
to your hair being tucked behind your ear
the most gentle gesture
and most fleeting care.
Sometimes, your nails carry
a soft, light chocolate mud,
the kind you played with
in the ephemeral pools
where you collected box turtles,
eastern newts, and spring peepers.
Small pebbles and stones
cut your fingers, but you keep digging.
And one day, you look down
only to see red clay beneath your feet, under your nails.
The oxidized iron of ancient mountain ranges
stains your clothes and your nail bed.
Its density slows you
in your tracks.
Its lodged stones and compacted particles
from lifetimes of erosion
make it near impossible
to claw through.
When you look back up,
you’re standing in the kitchen,
staring at the floor
covered with broken glass and blood,
a ringing in your ears drown out screaming.
You realize you’re not digging, but excavating.
Your cuticles, raw and bloody,
keep you reaching forward,
as you realize,
nothing grows here.
You work your way
through layers.
Quickly. Slowly.
Painfully, gently. Lovingly.
At some point, the tips of your fingers
lose their feeling.
But where your joints and tendons
all meet one another, you still feel
a grinding, radiating pain
that softly asks you to stop.
You already know
nothing grows here.
Out of 6,374 days,
you’ve found yourself here, today,
where every part of you wonders
what it would feel like to quit.
Sliced and ripped cuticles
burn and scream for relief
with a familiar intensity
that gives you chills.
Isn’t it the pain that evinces
all you’ve endured
just to arrive
in softer earth.
So one day, you paint your nails
the same pink hue as the earthworms you played with,
in hopes it may help you
dig a little faster one day,
in hopes no one sees
red clay stained beneath your nails.
One day,
you just start digging
and the next thing
you’ve traveled
through space and time,
a child again.