Rising

All at once and not without the same un-dramatic trappings my life had grown accustomed to, I was alone. Not, I supposed, palpably, for there were scores of names I knew and faces and shells and spirits all around me. Well wishers full of self supportive statements, mournful hollows and husks of individuals breathing in and out, feeling every bit of nothing like happiness but, in my head and in my heart. There where I’d spent so much time placating my dreams and fashioning the lives I planned to live; on sparkling sandy beaches or in shimmering sky scrapers or quaint obscure towns, down to the tiniest blades of grass, or thin crooked streams, babbling and cold, that ran behind the dark, cool and comfortable homes I had constructed for my gratifyingly child free futures, was where all my insignificance came to fester.

I wondered, maybe, sometimes, when I would smell the smoke on my sweater or fingertips or in the mass of my hair, why I had become like all those hapless lovers of indolence, whose most productive hours were spent not earning the backbones of survival, but scraping out this un-unique tortured existence. Why was it so easy for me to be broken down? I wondered liltingly, and with the promise to myself of a more imperative and remonstrant soul search, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. But tomorrow never came, or if it did I was too busy packing up my yesterdays, looking them over to be sure they had been of adequate use or, if in fact, they were in need of recycling, to answer it’s call.

You could never, and I was careful to remind myself of this, get them back, so I would hold them in my hands, fold and unfold, flip and turn and twist and wring them all out of shape and squish them cool and creamy, through the spaces between my fingers, the way a child assembles a mud pie, or a shy student attempts her first art class coil pot, mashing and molding and squeezing them back together.

It was not because I believed so much in the yesterdays. I didn’t and there was no joy in them. At least, not in all of those sullied tales of misadventure and woebegone dreams long since devoured to the inky expanse of my nightmares, whose nature I am loath to describe. It is rather, that these were my companions in arms, the purveyors of my stability, the delicate tendrils that writhed and wound themselves together, weaving me safe passage through the precipitous darkness that surrounded me.

I tried to pick up the rubble that had become my reality, the shards of my well crafted illusions and with each hoisting of myself back up and up again I began to feel a kind of warmth, a radiating heat gently enveloping me and glints and glimmers of light, bouncing off my fragmented world. The corners of my lips, I felt begin to turn as a flower toward the sun, waiting for the music to ring in my ears...