Skin and bone, flesh withered. Melancholy and grief walk hand in hand within your soul. You’ve forgotten when you last smiled, you’ve forgotten how to smile.
Time trinkles by like the patter of Tinker Bell’s steps. The sun doesn’t shine bright nor is the grass green. The waves crush unbidden upon the shore, smashing sand castles built by hasty infant hands. Within you crumble, like a rock being beaten at by the flow of a raging river, first beaten into smoothness, then into submission, cracks spreading, crumbling you cease to become whole.
Birds fly overhead in pairs, dogs sniff each other and run around in circles. Somewhere wedding bells ring and in the depths of your soul the ringing bounces back and forth, the echoes proclaiming the truth of what lies within you. The ants trail a line drawn by God, the sheep bleat and hump upon long pastures and the cows turn their heads to stare at you as you pass by and everything retreats from your presence for what you carry is contagion, what you are is hopeless, and what you’ve shrouded yourself in is despair.
In your mind’s eye you remember a lover you’ve never known. Whose hands are warm and whose touch is gentle. Whose caress is soft and whose whispers are eternal. A lover who sees no wrong to you and treats you as one would what they value most. The ghost of this fantasy fleets and escapes and the lover’s touch becomes hard and calloused and you feel iron pressing against your neck and the cold makes you aware of what life has to say to any fantasies you might hold regarding a lover that never was.
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You find solace in music, to the groaning cry of those tormented as you are. You prefer the strum of a violin to the beat of a drum. You seek to glide across sound waves as a surfer would a raging sea. You wish to be buried under melodies that make you remenisce about past victories that never truly existed. Delusion mires your every effort to find happiness and the reward is pointing fingers and laughing faces. You become a joke to those who see your struggles and the weight on your shoulder breaks your back.
Time, like the steps of a ladybird akin to fly, pushes you ever further and before you there’s a towering wall, flat as the surface of a runway and to reach the other side you must climb and it is with a weary heart that you turn around and head back from whence you came. Back to that silence within that echoes with the need to be no more, sadness touches you and the touch isn’t so bad. It was never that bad.
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