Terracotta

The wheel of fortune turns, squeaking and grunting, and look it pulls you out from the moist red soil you’ve been buried in up to your neck. It’s been a long time, such a long time, how does it feel to be traveling upwards in the blazing sun again, squinting and sweating in the heat; to feel your muscles dance a strained waltz under your skin. Take a deep breath of the diamond air stinging your lungs with a thousand needles. Take a deep breath before you reach the top of the world, where the next step you take plunges you into the sky, this time you will fly, won’t you.

There’s only so much me to go around.
I’ve handed out bits of me like merchandise wrapped in crisp brown paper. Carelessly. Trustingly. There’s only so much trust to go around. I imagine the paper being peeled away impatiently, curious fingers prodding at the crumpled piece of soul; I imagine it opening to the touch like a white flower. I’ve handed out pieces of my soul, randomly, and there’s only so much soul to go around.

For a moment, short as a heartbeat, I am someone else. On my way to somewhere else.

A wonderfully unfamiliar scenery glows gold and grey before my eyes.

The feeling ebbs and reality readjusts itself. Engulfing me.

And as the machine of time grinds minute after minute into sweet brown dust, I begin to forget. I watch, dispassionately and without regret, as memories trickle into oblivion, making way for new arrivals. What remains is smells and sounds – sometimes they will bring a shade of a memory back and cause it to buzz around for a little while, lured by the promise of fruit flesh dripping with sweetness, or by the creaking of lilacs blooming secretly in the dark. It will bump angrily into glass panes and mirrors – and then, just then, if you’re not careful, it stings – until it finds a way out through the cracks I made just above the window frame.