My Cardboard Balcony

Ever Since by Belinda Roddie Ever since you harassed me in my youth and haunted me in adulthood, I've lived a life of pain and unease, and the truth is that I can never interact with people the way that others do. I sweat and freeze in others' presence. Paralyzed, I stutter, stop, and find a parapet to prop my body against. Stopping cries from ripping from my body's hard enough, but then I see you enter the same bar that I've frequented for years. You act tough, yet I see heat in your eyes like a star dying slowly, turning to ash. I hope, sickeningly, you're broken and can't cope.

There was no scientific evidence for this. No fossils, no dusted off artifacts. No records or written theories or eyewitness accounts prior. No DNA samples, no data, no correlation. Nothing. And yet, there it was - and there we were - standing on the precipice of a crevasse where down below, the eroded yet still relatively intact spires of an ancient kingdom lay beneath our feet. The head of our archaeology team hypothesized that it must have been buried underground for thousands of years, yet the architecture of the revealed buildings seemed different than what we had researched in our history books; in fact, the design of it seemed fairly modern.