An imaginary tunnel through space and time, as Papa had explained to me seven springs after my birth. I was disappointed that it wasn’t a home for worms. How I wished it was a room cocooned in mud, where the Papa worm comes back home early evening and smokes a cigarette by the window. Next to him, Mama worm knits a scarf with the last of daylight. Between them, just a lost gaze reflecting the bedroom bulb’s insincere mellow. 

Since then, I’ve folded myself in crevices. Like an animal inching through the heart’s charcoal tunnels, a refugee dreaming of another home. My rooms are now filled with the damp songs of absence, each note an elegy to the past. All I’ve learnt of the worm is that no matter how bright the world outside, it crawls into a hypnotic dark: the body’s lyric hooked to that magnetic tune, offering itself as a lantern.