Your yard, unsleeping. The Milky Way turns, because it was always turning. Insects do audio commerce in the dark that enfolds your place upon the Earth, beneath a celestial panorama no one planned just so. You've looked before, felt the sound in your ears. You've striven to ignore it at times, even. You've looked hard, but now you find yourself looking... harder. Nothing is new this time, as the world continues its dance with its back to the sun. But everything is new. This night is not like other nights, because you are not as you were.

Having gained something or lost something—isn't it hard to tell sometimes?—now you see too much. You've looked hard enough that now you can't stop doing it. Every possession, every memento, it is a lens towards you, speaking about you via its mere existence. None of these objects serializes You, the capital You. Together, these form a kaleidoscope you did not plan with intent. It formed around you, looking in.

But what if You were the kaleidoscope? What if you were already the kaleidoscope, but had gotten lost inside your own confusion? Would it not take just one moment of realization to grasp a new direction, finally visible with clear eyes, surrounded as you are by what you did not plan?

With new eyes, you stalk your own home like an intruder now. Now, it's not so familiar. You don't rule this place. You know what does. You know when you see it. When it comes in your door, when you go to meet it, when it finds you. It threatens you by counting you as its subject. It never told you it was in charge of your heart, but because you think it does, it does.

You can leave. Did you know that? No you didn't. You keep forgetting. At times you may have thought on it, but dismissed the folly. What a mess it would be. What a mess. Why doesn't that scare you anymore?

Far enough away now to help you forget things like Authority and Obligation, and stigmas like Messy... ...you find it turns pleasant. You've run, and no one has stopped you. No one will, either, because no one is following.

Later, so much later, you allowed yourself a little too much freedom, but pain and risk are no longer strangers. Pain is a door, you know. Each one, a door. Not all pain was pointless, of course. You knew that the moment you left a thorny one behind. Somehow, the universe set pain to guard paths that went to entirely pain-free places. You wake up, having seen much pain and more. Every road taken was a branch of chaos that could not be planned. So then it was, when you woke to another's wind chimes, under a roof you did not build, you looked across from where you lay in a cot, and you spot... ...an agent of chaos like yourself, also here without future-sight. You met them, and you could not have without every unit of chaos behind you. Hold on close now. These don't come often.