The world went two-dimensional around a month ago,
a backdrop painted in a workshop somewhere far below
the resolution I remember from before it shifted,
I touch the walls and feel the texture but I feel unlisted.
My hands are in the foreground doing all the usual things,
making coffee, signing checks, answering my calls and pings,
but there is a glass between me and the fact of my own hands,
a laminate between the doing and the understands.
I got the derealization blues, the world is made of paper,
I got the derealization blues, I will feel it later and later,
everything is lit too bright and everything is still,
I am standing in my life watching from the windowsill.
The doctor ran the standard tests and all came back routine,
she asked about my sleep and stress, my coffee and caffeine,
she said it sometimes happens and it tends to pass with time,
I nodded in the consultation room and felt the rhyme
of what I could not tell her: that the room itself was wrong,
that she was slightly too precise, the colors were too strong,
that I could see the grain of things if I looked at any length,
the world had lost its natural depth, its tensile strength.
I drove home through the neighborhood I have driven thirty years,
and every house was slightly wrong, the distances like gears
that were not quite meshing, everything too close and then too far,
the stop signs too intensely red, too perfectly a scar.
I started cataloguing what feels real against what does not:
the burn of coffee on my tongue, the cold tile cold as caught,
the specific smell of rain on pavement coming through the screen,
building back the texture of the world I used to mean.