Written Whispers

She sat with her back to the cold stone of the fire place, white hair framing her already pale face with a ghostly hue. The sleeves of her robe bunched up around her arms making the fact that she was still so small all that more obvious to those of us who overlooked it every time she battled by our side and it was hard- impossibly hard not to look her in the eyes to see what you could find. They drew your questions from you like venom from a wound, first pulling them to the surface with the odd coloring and uneven tints and then tearing them from you and out into the open by her gentle will.

“What… what are you?”

‘Is this hesitation really mine?’

She smiled at me, the quirk in her lips beginning before the words even left my mouth. It was a weak little smile, composed entirely of the childish features that betrayed and lied about her true age all in the same motion.

“What am I?” A chuckled bubbled up from her chest- it’s sound sincere even as it nearly caused me to miss the wisdom that tore through her facade. “I am a child.”

I opened my mouth to object, that hadn’t been what I meant, but she was faster than I and it was clear that there was no turning back now.

“I am a mother- in some sense and a daughter in just the same.” Her eyes twinkled with the open riddle. “I am a lover to one, a friend to some, and a perceived threat to many. I am a fighter and a runner. A brave coward. A princess, and a commoner in every sense of the words. I am a liar with the truth and a seer blinded by the turns of my own fate.

“I am fire. A flame forever burning as it dies down to the lonely embers of the night. I cast both both shadows and light, give as I destroy. I am the choice forever in the making, never truly standing on one path or another. The footstep constantly left behind at my actions and the blood coursing through the veins of an angry mob.”

She stood, wavering carefully as she leaned back against the stones for balance. The battle had taken it’s toll from all of us but as she spoke she seemed to gain strength even at the cost of her words. “I am so many, many things but none of them are as important or inconsequential as this.” She pointed a shaking finger at herself. “What I am is the circle forever turning, the stars forever burning, and the new day constantly being reborn in myself. I am not yet who I want to be but what I am is the choices I make to get there.”

There was fire in her eyes, not angry, but brazen. Ready to pursue the battle anew and with greater vigor even as she continued to shake.

“I am me. I don’t know who I am yet but I know what I will become to be who I want to be.”

I cleared my throat, seeking to ask even more questions though she’d neatly sidestepped the one I’d thought most important. “You really seem to care about the difference between who and what you are, don’t you?”

She smirked, a little more color coming into her face at the action and her eyes dimming down to more human-like hues. “Wouldn’t you? If you were constantly being tested by people who both coveted and despised you for whatever they thought you to be wouldn’t you care deeply for the one thing they overlooked? The one thing you had to yourself- that no others bothered to make claim on?” Her smile grew and she whispered. “I certainly do.”

“Is that why you… ?” I let the thought hang. There were no words in me to finish it though I desperately wanted to know.

“Yes.” Her reply was simple where the question was not. “That is why I stand between the paths- there is no one for someone of my nature and there forever shall I remain. Perhaps you’ll come join me someday when you can answer your own questions with the same conviction from which you ask them.”

I nodded without another word on my lips.

The next day she disappeared into the fray, found neither dead nor alive amidst the battle but immortal within this ever fighting child’s heart.

If you don’t know me, and I mean really, really know me this post will definitely confuse you on a few different levels. This isn’t creative writing. There is no real attempt on my part to bring forth proper writing style- hell, you’re lucky I even spell checked this thing since that’s more for your convenience than mine. This is just me taking my perception of something I know a lot of others won’t get, pulling together all the words I have, and throwing them at this virtual paper.

It’s something of a spiritual thing for me and probably nothing and everything like it sounds. Nevertheless, whether you understand it or not, feel free to read and comment though I can’t promise I’ll answer any questions on this one unless you’re familiar with what I mean by any sentence containing the word ‘wings’.

No, I don’t feel any need to clarify that or anything else but if you’re a regular reader then that’s what you love about me so I feel no need to do anything different.

That one pivotal moment when all the threads of fate came together before my very eyes to show me the clay to which this form was bound in. Soft and giving, easily torn and yet just as easily remolded. Never truly destroyed but instead renewed with each new shape it takes.

I could see it as you see these words, simple and true.

I was the clay from which these threads strayed.

Many fear the great moment after this moment, this realization- the one where we are pulled from our clay for the remolding as our threads are strewn across the nexus and rewound in another time and place. It is unfounded, the fear, and that in itself gives them even more reason to be afraid of it- the great unknown. There are so many questions we are not permitted to ask if only for the lack of one who will answer them. Questions like; what lies after the unbinding? Is there any after? Does it hurt? Does it hold no feeling at all?

That is only a brush of the anxiety- the smallest bit that we can understand and pull into the minds within our clay. Few reasons that spawn more with every passing worry.

I can’t say I’ve ever shared that fear but not for lack of self-preservation. Perhaps this shape of mine is too young? Perhaps instead of naivety- it’s what I knew that kept me here?

Yes. That sounds more accurate.

There were times, dark and desperate, when I brought that second moment to my doorstep- reaching for it against the will of the threads and shearing through the clay of my shell with a needle like delicacy born in uncertainty. Even then, I did not fear it. I feared making a choice I couldn’t go back on- as most tend to be. I feared the disappointment I would find in others, those here and the others I wouldn’t escape. Most of all- I feared the moment after the second moment, the moment that none fear for they never think to make it that far.

I feared what I knew.

Of all the silly things.

No, I have never feared the second moment when all things are rendered apart and resewn. It wasn’t/isn’t in my nature. True, I had feared it for others, my loved ones most especially, but for a purely selfish reason- they are mine and I would miss them greatly. Grief is a river of loss I know all to well and have no intention of returning to any time soon.

More to the present though, I was not to have that second moment, nor, by proxy, was I to have the third. I was still in the one before either, the moment of the greatest knowing I’ve ever to experience.

It was in that moment, as we sped along through the darkness, that I knew everything about the girl within the girl- a smooth crone behind the wrinkled child. Pain lacing down my neck and spine I looked to her and saw the wings unfolding- mine and hers, as in that one pivotal moment we became whole once more and she allowed us to remember.

We are here.

We are here now.

This is where we are supposed to be, right now, and despite it all- how the threads of others effect my own, the choice lay in the human half of myself for this one moment. I had only to think it and it would be done. The ones who had taken our memory had finally given this back, this choice to move one way or another. To continue or start anew.

Nevertheless, as I was the only one to ever yearn for it, the choice weighed heaviest on my clay shoulders. The conscious self that so often acts in ignorance.

Even a moment, a single, special, fragile fragment of time can change everything endlessly and as the knowing, the remembering, and being flowed into me I too was changed.

I live in the clay. She moves the clay. From us, through us, and binding us together the threads of fate flow. Following them all I saw what I needed to see- what the artist sees when she steps back from the tapestry and the scribe from her novel.

I had touched the universe.

In the short period of time it’s been within this lump of clay, the spark that is uniquely me has touched thousands if not more. With each path I took I crossed the path of another, each of us altering the others and continuing on to do the same to another and another until all of our threads are wound so tight we make the spool that is the world full of life and living.

I looked to those around me, to these precious people I call my own, and saw a thread from each of them in return to my own- something I had been born without and denied long since my first heart’s beat. A connection. A two way connection. Love.

Yes, my time here was up in the sense that my presence was no longer mandatory. I had served my term and fulfilled the goals she had set before us. If I chose to leave in that moment others would pick up where my threads left off, crossing the paths that needed to be crossed, and marking the ways that need be marked for others- perhaps my new form in freshly molded clay. The universe would fill the gap that I would leave behind and we would be free to move on to our next great walk.

It was okay to let go.

It is this knowing that changed me in that moment.

It set me free.

I would not be a disappointment to myself, to others- here or there. I wouldn’t be leaving reparable damage in my wake and I would be making a choice I was given, a choice I had earned but even as I looked about my clay self in that strange peripheri of hers/ours I saw once more those true connections and I couldn’t look away.

Whereas I had impacted the whole world- it too had impacted me.

My soul is my soul. Split down the core as she/we have always been. Like all clay- I’ve yearned to be whole once more, to claim my true shape for what it is and fly with her but in that moment, that single moment that changed everything, her and I grew closer for the fact that a part of me was no longer her’s alone. Where before I had seen chains, keeping me to the clay and away from my true self I now saw fragile silken strings that could hardly keep me from floating away and I held the scissors in my fumbling human hands.

My choice was made.

We were staying.

Apart. Together. United over an abyss that was no longer empty.

She is me as I am her. We have an eternity to rejoin. Till then the gap is fill with souls as precious as butterflies in the spring and I refuse to leave them even if it means I have to wait a little while before finding my own wings.

In that moment, that one moment, I held death as she held me- tenderly wrapped in each other’s arms…

And I decided to live.

She was born under a Sagittarian sky. A winter sky. An early sky.

It’s far too early.

This world was meant to be a different place, under a different sky.

She was to come and bring hope to a place and a people who were ready to accept it but instead she finds herself in a world on the brink. Sitting on the cliffs between an unimaginable void of self destruction or the precipice of something new, a world just about to open their eyes and begin accepting one another and all things as they truly are.

Instead she was born into this world. Under this sky. Too early.

Instead she was born eyes open into a blind world with blind ways. The people here are so used to stumbling that when one walks straight they are known as the outsider. So, in turn it is she who sees that feels the most blind amongst her peers, stumbling over their well worn paths without escape.

This land is strange and these are not her ways. To watch as others look on day in and day out, from sunset to sunrise, and the crossing of the moon across their sky. They watch and have the ability to see so much but they do nothing. Accept nothing. Let the nothing consume them until it is so full it becomes a something much more powerful than that which the human mind can comprehend.

False wordings and worded falsehoods. These often unknowingly forked tongues speak a language she can’t seem to master and in her soul she is thankful but in her heart is sad. Without language she can’t communicate, can’t help them, can’t reach out, cannot awaken. She is lonely to be born so soon under this ever darkening sky. No others are here and at the same time- they are. They are here and she knows it. She sees them and gathers them but they do not know it.

They have blinked but the eyes are not yet open, the sun of this sky too burned down for them to see properly.

This world is not yet her world. It is a cruel world with cruel ways that make her bones ache and her soul quake in despair. Children’s tears for rain and industrial smog for cloud cover, this is the normal forecast of the day. They breath in chemicals willingly and only money can push those with power into caring about how many more years their world will last and wether or not their grandchildren will see the dawn of a new day and if the rainforest will have been a mere story of the old.

But it’s alright. Let them continue their ways under their sky. Let the moon rise and fall in their time so that it might end and be done with. All the sooner our sky can rise. All the sooner we will be ready for the hope. All the sooner she can awaken the sleepers.

She is not the only one.

The sleepers sleep to protect themselves from the radioactive hatred of this world. They too have come here early but in a different perception of the word. Everyone is much too early. No one should be born under this sky. This is not our world. Our world is meant to be a place of peace and coexistence with so much more than just ourselves. To be wide eyed and awakened, lively and free.

As it stands this sky can be meant for no one. No one should have to accept this for what it is.

She was not yet meant to be, this new child. A being meant to lay in wait until this world was ready for her, ready for the birth of a new sky, ready to love and accept one another. No, she is much too early, but alas, time is running out. This sky is fading and the new one is not yet on the horizon. The sleepers must awaken, they must awaken and hold back the doom until their is a new sky to live under else all shall fall into the ever growing nothingness.

Let the sleepers awaken under this dark sunrise. May there be just enough light left to hold you over until our moon crosses into the future sky.