It’s the high holy days, the beginning of the new year when we ask to be rewritten into the book of life and atone for the wrongdoings of the past year. I’ve always felt autumn is more of the season for the new year than January, maybe because my birthday is in it, so I have been trying to account for my many failings and flaws lately.

I haven’t felt very good about myself, although I don’t know how much of that is due to my lack of employment and reliance on my parents. I know I am supposed to honor my mother and father but when I live with them, when Mom works at home and complains I see her as a “playmate”, when Dad demands I “use my brawn” whenever anything needs lifting or dragging and sticks his nose up at the prospect of helping me out physically ever while regularly bemoaning “i’m tryin’ to help!” when it feels like pestering and nagging, it’s extremely difficult. I’m lucky I have them, I’m aware of that. I remind them that I love them often with both words and actions, Mom more often because she’s around more.

The future just looks so bright I feel like staring at the sun, risking blindness if I try for too long. I don’t want to be Not In Education Employment or Training (a NEET, the discord server I’m in calls us) through the twenty fourth year of my life but I don’t want to work at a job I’ll hate even though that’s probably a rite of passage. I don’t know what I’m doing. Half the time I don’t feel like I’m doing anything but wasting time on Reddit or writing words very few people will read.

Being Jewish is scary in a world where Israel is bombing multiple countries and everyone has always and will always associate Israel with Jews. My neighbors have children in Israel, can you keep them safe at least? I know that part of the world is not exactly easy for you to enact influence, what with free will being such a human right you’ve given us and propaganda having infected generations of citizens, so I’m just going to contain that part of this prayer to selfishness. Keep my cousins and neighbor’s kids alive.

May we beat the weapons of war into ploughshares and don’t stop. Keeping beating them into musical instruments! May whoever next attempts to wage war have to beat them back into ploughshares first. That was a poem in the Siddur I memorized as a child and still agree with.

Thank you for letting me live in a world where the beauty of nature still exists, even amidst civilization. Seeing the viceroy butterflies and bumblebees and every creature that could possibly live on a goldenrod this summer has helped keep me sane. Even witnessing death and then life reborn from death has been beautiful, like when the ant colony was dragging a dragonfly a hundred times its size across the sidewalk and I not only had the chance to see it but to video it for others on YouTube to see as well. People liked it! People also disliked it, but still, I brought joy to someone who otherwise wouldn’t have been as happy. Maybe.

Please let me live to eat apples and honey again next year. Thank you, amen.

The universe where I was born on time: January 2001 rather than October 2000. My childhood would not have been spent almost a quarter of the time in hospitals. I would have been in a different class in school, the year beneath what I was in this universe, so the specifics of my childhood would be different: different friends, different enemies, maybe different teachers. The neighborhood dynamics would have been different growing up too, a year younger than the other kids - they would not know me as well. Maybe I’d seem less strange that way. Maybe my mom would have kept her fellow mom-friends from the neighborhood after I started Kindergarten in that universe. Then again, my older brother was more of why my mom had been outcast than I was.

There’s the parallel universe my parents sometimes bring up, where my older brother was born normal, rather than cognitively impaired. They think he would have been a salesperson, an entrepreneur, maybe a computer geek or an actor - he loves movies, so the possibilities of what he could have done with that had he been neurotypical are plentiful. I would have lived with him until I was twelve rather than him leaving home when I was four the way he had in this universe.

Maybe I would have still been a singleton in another universe, or maybe I’d go to the universe where my mom was able to have both twins - we would have to be born on time to have any chance of survival, but having a twin brother would severely change who that baby girl that I once was grew up to be. Maybe I wouldn’t be transgender. Maybe she would stare at me, unable to recognize herself from this alternate universe, unable to reconcile such a singular weirdo with her healthy, birthday-in-January, born-as-a-package-deal self.

There would be parallel universes without alternate versions of my life at all - ones where my mom married the rabbi she dated before my dad, or never left Michigan for her Master’s degree, one where my dad’s parents never left Montreal, one where he never left Missouri or journalism, or never moved to Boston after law school, many universes where my parents never befriended the couple that had set them up or simply never made it to the blind date where they had met, or where they fell out of touch after…

Millions of universes without my life exist - the more difficult part would be finding my life within parallel universes, considering how many events were required before my birth would even be possible. I imagine the technology to enter parallel universes would include some way to search out your life, out of the billions of lives in existence - maybe sorted alphabetically and chronologically?

Perhaps one would be able to filter what year they want to see, so I could start with the alternate universes involving my birth in 2000 and then move backwards to universes involving my brother as child, and so on, exploring further and further into history until I'm not even exploring my life in a parallel universe anymore but just time travelling! Or maybe the technology would require an anchor, oneself or a relative to tie the universes together so the fabric fails to fall apart. That would make more sense.

The sky rippled in reflection of the flowing stream, where caddisflies anchored themselves to dead leaves, sticks, and various other debris, only moving to reveal their presence when disturbed by non-current motions, like the frog returning to the moisture, slapping the surface as it reentered. The frog’s return jostled the caddisflies away from their larger hiding spots, but the fear of predation kept them momentarily still. They then retreated to cover, to their own nutritional duty of filtering the stream for edible algae.

A snail used its foot to slither across the pebble-filled bottom, searching for its own feast of chlorophyll in the watery ecosystem, or perhaps a fellow mollusk to entangle its slime trail with, slither body along body as their mucus merged, bodies merging as one of the couple unsheathed a love dart and stabbed the other. This snail was far from alone, and indeed, slithered upon another snail's shell, signaling interest.

Unbeknownst to the couple beginning their mating ritual on the bottom of the stream, the sky that had been reflected earlier was beginning to pour the condensed contents of its clouds back into the environment, rain falling into the existing flow of water. The puddles that formed would eventually also merge into the water, unless they evaporated.

There appears to have been a struggle. The struggle’s specifics cannot be discerned currently, but someone has died. Their death was determined by the presence of blood and bone fragments at scene of the crime. The species of the bone fragments cannot be determined currently, but something with vertebrae died, or was crushed somehow, which is unlikely to have occurred without death or serious disfigurement of the spinal column. Serious disfigurement of the spinal column typically results in death, at least in all known vertebrate organisms on Earth.

Was it possible that the struggle occurred off-planet? No known organisms currently containing bones can be found anywhere other than Earth, but it is impossible to rule out the possibility that alien time travel could have been involved in the struggle. Then again, the vast majority of struggles involving blood and bone fragments occur on Earth, with known species as the combatants. Yet the blood has not been tested to discern the specific species, nor have the bone fragments been tested for DNA. Therefore alien or off-planet interference cannot be conclusively ruled out as intervening factors in the yet-still-unspecified struggle. Further reporting may be forthcoming following an actual investigation of the scene.

I’ve been knitting a blanket for a friend of mine for such a long period of time I can no longer remember exactly how many years ago I started knitting it. She’s been my friend since my first year at Bishop’s University. The blanket is a patchwork of color, multiple rectangles sewn together, entirely made by knit stitches. Talia, the friend who will one day own the blanket, will be visiting me in a month. My friendship with her, unlike the work on the blanket, is not constant - we were closer when we both attended Bishop’s University, and now we go weeks without messaging each other. I sometimes worry when I finish the blanket, ideally will be within the month, our friendship might go when she does. I don’t want it to, though, so I will probably put the effort in to continuing to communicate with her.

A patchwork of everyone I ever loved would have so many holes in it that it would be a more like a pile of rags than an article of clothing. People I loved are not necessarily people I currently love. So if it's a patchwork, some of the patches have had a seam-ripper torn through them, leave holes behind. Ironic, really, considering patches are usually meant to hide holes.

There's a hole where my first ever friend once was - Grace, who used to violently attack me when we got into arguments, who I once could not imagine a life without. She was in my patchwork quilt for seven years before I took the thread and started tearing. I thought she would actually murder me by the end - she tried, twice. We had broken into a swimming pool so there weren't any lifeguards, any adults at all actually, and after I jumped, she jumped on top on me, her feet on my shoulders, keeping me underwater. She must have loved me, or at least regretted or feared what she had done. I didn't actually drown - my next memory is puking out water on the concrete. Eleven years old and I had had my first taste of mortality that I could attribute to another human being rather than my body failing me.

If I'm a patchwork of everyone I've ever loved, quite a lot of me must be other people because I have loved many in my life. My first romantic love was, like most first loves, unrequited, leading to my first heartbreak. She had been my best friend, so it was something between a friendship ending and a breakup. I mourned. Thirteen years old, of course I thought my life was over. At fourteen I had my first and only romantic relationship where emotions existed on both sides - that was when I had my first kiss. I was told I was a terrible French kisser. He had had an abusive homelife and I hadn't learned exactly how the cycle of abuse worked since Grace hadn't been abused herself, so I pitied him without realizing he had been mistreating me until after he had decided we were done. That was three months of my life, the only experience I bring regarding loving someone in that specific silk patch.

Then again, if I'm a patchwork of everyone I've ever loved, is love the thread? Does love hold me together? I would prefer to believe something stronger was what sewed me up, maybe passion or curiosity, something I could attribute to myself alone, but no man is an island. I guess this is a snapshot of what that quilt would look like.

Caverns carry the sounds of wingbeats. Bats hang on the underside of the cave, mating and roosting, slumbering during the daytime. Beneath them, other cave fauna make their home in the guano. Then, when nightfall arrives, the wingbeats echo off the cavern’s edges as hundreds of hungry hunters fly off in search of sustenance.

There are few who willingly enter caves - few human beings, that is. Echoes make us doubt ourselves, feel self conscious of the footsteps that would, on other surfaces, be silent. But some people study the creatures of the caves, the beings that live within. Some people study echoes themselves; the physics of sound, how it bounces off objects.

There’s a connection between echoes and water - most creatures that use echolocation are aquatic, as electricity travels more easily in water. Fish have an electric sense to make the most of that reality. Mammals that echolocate are usually ones that returned to the sea, cetaceans communicating across oceans. But even on land, caves were formed by water, ancient water. There, too, mammals, the only ones capable of flying, use echoes to make their sense of the environment.

The echo maker, human ecologist, visitor to this world of echoes, entered the habitat, the cavern. So many creatures could be crushed beneath the feet that make those echoing footsteps, no matter how carefully said human points their lamp and watches where their feet land. So many small beings underfoot - centipedes, spiders, beetles; guano is quite a foundation for an ecosystem to be built on.

Certain species can only be found in specific caverns, and the unwelcome human has to be the one to record said species’ existence, count their numbers if possible, try to kill minimally in spite of humanity’s footprint on the planet crushing far less isolated ecosystems than these.

Maybe the creatures prefer not to be recorded or counted, to live unnoticed in the caverns, echo makers but without anyone but other echo makers to hear said echoes. Maybe the human would perish, unpreserved except in skeletal remains. The feat of removing a human in a cave is far more difficult than the feat of recycling beings with exoskeletons. Maybe all that will remain are echoes of a maker, of a person attempting to make a hidden world slightly less hidden.

Being stuck is the natural state of spirits. Being caught in a web, or tangled while attempting to spin one, nothing could be more natural in the world than stickiness. Limbo, limb, a limb is a limb, like a leg or claw or branch reaching towards the light. A spirit stuck in limbo is like a limb stuck in a spider's web, trying to free itself.

Human limbs free themselves easily from spider webs - they barely even feel the silk that took such effort to spin into shapes. But smaller limbs, like the skeletal delicate legs of an ant, they remain stuck until the spirit leaves them, the spider sucks them dry.

The world can suck a human spirit dry; and usually the ones doing said sucking aren't attempting to gain sustenance the way a spider is. The other humans can keep a spirit stuck in limbo for days, weeks, months, waiting to hear back, to obtain the currency that keep people able to obtain food in ways less visceral and traumatizing than how spiders obtain their food.

A spirit stuck in limbo is waiting, the way a worm waits on the sidewalk as it dries in the sun, having left the dirt during a rainstorm. A human spirit left waiting has an advantage to that worm - it knows what concrete is, what the sun will do if the spirit fails to move. Being stuck isn't always a choice, but one has choices to make while waiting, while stuck, while unsure and insecure of their place in the world of people. Stay in the shade, nurture limbo the way the sun nurtures limbs, branches of a tree reaching towards it - there are free resources for spirits stuck if one knows where to look. Libraries are brilliant ways to keep one's mind intact while waiting for a more fulfilling pastime. Prose, writing, that's how this spirit keeps afloat while in limbo.