At lunch I escaped from school for a couple of minutes to sit in the park and read. The sun was out today. Everything beginning to take on that sense of over-exposure that summer seems to bring. My body remembering how to sweat.

Watching the birds and a bunch of schoolchildren.

The kids' matching uniforms look like a diagram of mountain strata as they line up along the fence to watch the ducks in the pond. The blue skyline of their hats runs along the white and brown sedimentary strata of shirts, broken here and there by the tectonics of some tall kid. They stand for a moment together in a line, and then shift apart into pairs and hurry away to the next thing to see, stragglers run to catch up, scaring away as they do the birds I sat close to. Kids here are so cute.

The birds were ones like I haven't ever seen back home and today this struck me as strange. Every little thing is different here, down to the children, the birds, the grass and soil. Crossing the street is different. Brushing my teeth is different. But how common all the differences now seem, how natural. But not.

At the same time the differences are still there, still different. As if I travelled on a mobius strip, so that while I might visit the same places and view the same things, I might sometimes view them from the other side. Or as if a ghost of myself were tailing me at every moment and whispering in my ear. So that when I crossed the street again for the 338th time, still I might hear "what's that song that's playing?"