Found in a tattered box in the depths of a brick bungalow built in the year of your grandmother's birth is a letter. A snapshot, exuding a vapor of whimsy. The walls are dirt, adventurous roots saluting passersby, and the box is soft with the damp. Herein contained are the remains of a past life, perhaps yours or a loved one's, one rich in wonder. The scrawling ribbon of language reads like a song, calmly biding it's time and billowing in euphoria. And perhaps it is a dream, this parchment testimony, but it is covered in bangles and scarlet. A gong that leaves your ears warbling.
She speaks of the rolling fear, the thundering darkness she had known. It stained and scarred her, deprived her of air, light, and touch. Beat her into submission. Like a fundamental error in her soul, she knew not how to escape it's bonds. It was not spoken of, this being, a product of scrutiny and therefore inescapable. She turned her face away.
For a storyteller, she knows no sense of linear time, tossing laughter and tears into the same void and creating her own stormy wealth. Learning to live without, she tread with sturdy soles on the face of a triumphant peak and was not exhausted. She bore children, singing the blues and wearing her palms rough for love. She was bound by a circle, never broken, but wrapped in sinewy scars.
As for the binding fright, she squared her shoulders and let her sprinting heart conduct her. The mortar crumbled. Her eyes beheld not rubble, but a field of wild grasses and the kiss of the grasshopper. The kiss of a violet sun. She revels in anonymity and ephemerality. Her face may show no age, but her days are innumerable.
I wish to be she, and I am when I choose to be.
I am a lion today and a baby tomorrow.
16 January 2010
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