Sitting at her desk, her hands hovering over the keys on the laptop, she tried to capture the moment when the glass slipped from her fingers, its fate decided by her sudden loss of feeling. She heard the crash, saw the utter disintegration of the goblet into a thousand pieces, like her heart in that moment. She tried to get it down...nothing came. Nothing that seemed able to hold all the things that she had felt...was still feeling. She closed her eyes, and let whatever came find its place on the screen.
Looking down, she saw the words, and saw how she should arrange them. Making quick work of them, she fashioned this:
Scatter
The fragments all...
Let fall the glass that holds
The liquor of celebration's
Fake joy.
Shatter
The hoarded dreams...
Release the gath'ring hope
That grows in swelling waves of red
Inside.
She read it. It did not feel complete. It did not speak the full measure of her pain. It did not plumb the depths. But it was here now, committed to the air, to the screen, to the eye. A tangible thing, outside herself, that she could examine, like a coroner would a corpse. She resisted the urge to correct it, adjust it, fix it. It was what it had been born. She could not change its essence any more than she could change the moment it described. That, at least, was written in stone, and even if the stone shattered, its truth would remain.
Embracing it, she gathered the strength to let it go, and walked away...
Tags: mic
2 comments:
A finely written capture of those moments of fragility that come to us from time to time...
A distillation of a moment of distillation. This is a fine piece of writing which, like the writing it brackets, shouldn't be tampered with.
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