brontide
“Was the past always stalking the present, waiting to destroy it? A two-dimensional question like that had no solution, and therefore no meaning. ‘Make a triangle with a past, present, and future. Then each two will explain the third.’”
The girl sits at the shelf of the wood where the stones turn to dust and the birds cannot cry out. They speak with blue wings and black beaks, cutting the air with slivers of silence. What is not said carries more merit than anything sung by the Raven.
A steady eye beams from the pale roof of the forest. It sees all things that stand away from the shadow. The girl sits under the bough of one long tree, hiding in plain view. The ants watch the girl from their cracks in the bark. Rubbing their antennae, hieroglyphs in sound.
The Third Way is being born within the girl. Her mind is more porous than it was before. She cannot communicate how she feels, preferring to use gestures and songs to illustrate the action. Words have failed humanity. Promises broken time and time again. Misalignment between fact and form. Deception through poetry. The girl is wounded deeply. Like the broken stems of wildflowers, the head and body are severed.
People turned to falsehoods in place of hope. Claiming concrete land masses for themselves with metal gates and guns for protection. Plastic in place of the natural elements. The people preferred to consume non-biodegradable objects as a symbol of eternal life. Not understanding that decomposition and creation are of the same source.
The girl was one of the Starseeds who escaped the mundanity. Madness was for the awestruck, the hopeful and the hopeless. Those consumed with beauty, grief, joy, and suffering. The girl had been classified as M148KLG-9. When the issue came through, she broke the window and bade the eye protect her- braving the bright, white heat as she scaled the rock wall in a pair of blue fuzzy slippers.
It wasn’t anyone’s fault. The binary persists. If you are not one way, Our Way, you were the wrong way and a threat to society.
Mundanity is revered in this world. The performance of the rote tasks that contribute to a functioning society. Labouring over tedious details. Complaining about work. Ascribing to the simple soliloquies of the powerful and rich. Flitting from task to task, considering what must be done next. Standing in line. Protecting the heart. Pursed lips; to smile and frown was an omission of madness.
The girl could not keep up with the rules. As soon as one was formed and followed, another order appeared on the screen. The tether was too strong. The weekly soliloquy was a low buzz in the girl’s body that made her scalp itch and hands sweat. Words and more words: the eye must be avoided, do not stand in its gaze. Skin to skin contact spreads germs, do not touch your neighbour. Song broke the tenour of dedication to work; no music, singing, humming, or whispers. Spirits were sipped six times daily; you could ask for a double dose if you needed more.
The peasant’s cocktail. Many took the liquid concoction by the ounce. The prescribed amount was not followed and shots of the thick, blue fermentation were produced at an increasing rate. The wealthiest were those who bought up land and established the production of potatoes.
Get Rid Of Anxiety! Heal Your Trauma. Never Feel Bad Again.
Copywriters took advantage of the inevitable despair and guaranteed a more desirable outcome with every shot consumed. To refuse the drink was to stick out like the stinger on a bumblebee. Till death do us part.
The girl hated the drink. It slid to the back of her throat and stuck there. She’d devised a way to hold the mass in her mouth to allow speech. To prove it was gone. Once alone, she’d spit it into whatever receptacle was close at hand. The small plant in her room was her preferred place to purge. The plant died after a month of spitting and the girl vowed to get out. Not wanting to wither and die on the insides like the orchid. She would take the pain to purchase a moment of beauty.
There were more Starseeds. The girl felt the truth in her body. She did not know where they were or how to find them. The answers will appear as they always did. Like the day the girl knew she had to climb from the window and run to the woods. It was in her gut. It shuddered in her chest. By the time it reached her mind, it was no longer a feeling- it was a fact.
The mad and the mundane, was there not a third way?
Could a person be both and something else through the combination of the two?
Was there not a point for the suffering and the solace to meet?
The either/or was devised to divide. A simple and effective method to create a line through the circle. Cutting the contract in half. The buildings were lines; the streets were lines, their mouths were lines, and the people stood in a line and slept in a line and never danced.
It was the girl’s spinning that got her into trouble. The steady roll of her pelvis, the rotation at the wrist. She needed the spirals in her body and spent hours rolling in her room on the cold linoleum floor. The neighbour had seen from his spidey place down the hall- a crack in the doorframe that allowed a sliver of light and iris to peer into the meagre practices that kept the girl sifting through her dreams.
The rotation caused a rupture and the girl was summoned to the Great Room for Review. She was asked a few questions; mostly, the examiners talked and touched her body to assess its temperature. The girl boiled. They gave her a slip of paper and told her to return with all her personal items the following day. She needed to be separated from society; she was a threat to the routine, and her radical rhythms posed calamity.
The girl had wondered what they were to do with her, though she did not want to ask. The words kept coming and were in complete contrast with what she felt. So the girl stayed silent. She invoked the space to fill her body and spread the slow, undulating motions through her being only the unseen eye was capable of perceiving.
In silence, the sensation is born. The girl walked to her dormitory and feined the drink and sleep. The cool shock of moonlight bade her from bed. She knew she had to flee, quickly and quietly, before something was stolen from her spirit. Either way, she would never return to this room as who she was.
The escape was swift; the girl had the sense of the Raven and knew to hush her tones and send her light in all directions to feel for predators. Birds are harmonious creatures for their ability to see the broader perspective. The girl soaked it all in as she ran to the privacy of the trees.
Bowing before the Great Mother, she asked the ants and the birds and the rough bark, where do I belong? Where do I go next?
As the eye wanes, the girl follows its light to the edge. She walks through the purple, pink, orange, and gold beams that cast deeper contours on the rock and earth. Her slippers are heavy with brambles and leaves. The night is near, though panic has yet to creep into the girls being. She is cold and comforted by the cloak that presents the stars and moon. She walks on, listening with her entire body.
She walks on through the darkness.
Her eyes search for a crevasse to recline, and there is nothing to hold her close for a few hours. Sleep must be invited. There is no womb to reconcile the despair and the dread. She has been thrust out and must go on seeking.
She walks on in the way of the third.
Photo source.
