"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
There is a golden girl with silver dapples of sunlight. She wafts in on an early summer breeze while the scent of spring lingers in her milk-black hair. It’s like watching a haunted ballet. Each step she takes is soft and deliberate; each mark she makes is a ghostly kiss on the earth. She takes a swallowing breath of warm cotton air and lets the grass lick her hocks, losing herself in the spirit of the season and the open rollicking expanse of the shimmering meadow. She closes her eyes. She breathes. She becomes a ghost across the plain. She lets her soul fly.
The girl was troubled, the girl is troubled, the girl can’t find her tense. She is born from a long line of mental instability, she is born of fire and blood and fight, she is free from it. Her name is Centralia, she is hollow and full. Her skin is taught across her bones, hugging her ribs too tight, making her look frail but she doesn’t seem to mind. It doesn’t seem to concern the girl at all. The little buckskin girl, lost in the middle of the meadow but found. She has dragonflies for eyes and she stands in the sunlight dreaming of things beyond herself.
She waits for nothing, nothing waits for her. The late spring eddies about her, creates a currant around her golden skin. She is lost in the windy rip-tide.
I am a shut, locked, and hidden novel that has found its way beneath bed frames and dust mounds. I have glued my spine and spoiled my words with endless spills of water. My book was written before my birth, dictated before my first breath, and told before my first steps. I was a one hit wonder with an author who couldn’t stick around to see the fans cry.
My book will soon be burned, with seldom leftover papers used to rekindle a dying flame.
My black frame meanders the meadow treeline like a cougar slinking across a tempered floor with gentle feet and an agile stride. For every step I take, I feel my body weaken and my heart feel heavy, and for this reason I have chosen to cower along the sidelines and indulge in the darkness of shadows.
Spring hits me like a train hitting a bouncy ball—I am tiny and irrelevant. Spring isn’t my favorite season, it is the season of giving life and rebirth. It is the season of growing and prospering. My body is still damp from waking up in a puddle of melted snow and caked in an earth brown tone that hinders my silver tone. Last night I had bedded myself in the last cushion of white snow, satisfied with the remainder of the season being at my convenience and woke up to feeling chilled and assaulted with springs welcoming.
Needless to say my morning has been less than ideal.
The dark shadows are the cure to my anxiety; it is a pill I will continuously inject into my veins only to feel the thrill of calmness. It is a high that I only feel when cool air brushes my skin and shade devours every inch of sunlight. It is why I tend to slink myself into the water dead center of the meadow while the moon is at full view, when no one can come to deaden my euphoria.
She has followed me, lately. Her twin like frame and black eye sockets that remind me of what black holes would feel like. They entrap you and circle your body, with no real physical object but yet this power of magnetism. She is thin, agonizingly bony with rasped breathing and clotting cuts across her chest. My mother is both my nightmare, and my dream. Her brief appearances have been enough to haunt my last waking moments before sleep and startle my first morning yawn. I feel her presence, and then I see her soul.
I cannot read if it is disappointment that radiates from her onyx mask, or a sense of neutrality—the kind of feeling where you aren’t completely a failure, however you aren’t exactly winning.
My thoughts have begun to overwhelm my physical presence and my head has become the focus. I am so withdrawn from my surroundings that the sun piercing my skin doesn’t alert my body that I have wandered off path, nor does the new aroma of female.
I am watching her from behind, her soft and steady gait matching my own careful stride.
It is my nose that hits her skin, and then my entire forehead throughout the motion. I feel myself fold in her body before regaining my balance.
If I had any sense of heterosexuality (or any sexuality, really) I would acknowledge her feminine build and dappled frame. I would appreciate her presence and perhaps add with my own. But she is like a beautiful sheep with the company of a deer. I am my own species, and she is hers.
I watch her with a suspicious eye, my heart quickening and my body beginning to tense. I softly hear the voice of my mother, but Opacity, maybe this one is to be trusted. It grinds my skin like nails on chalkboard, her voice painfully brittle. They are never different, it is like planting a rose after years of planting, only to hope for a lily. She is not a lily.
