sillage
“Today, as never before, the fates of men are so intimately linked to one another that a disaster for one is a disaster for everybody.”
I am making preparations to leave. I realize how little I need; I’ve given more than I carry this time. Each departure recreates my image. I am not who I was when I arrived.
Is change really this simple?
I move toward all that flourishes. The porous crystals of my skin reach out, seeking light. Like the chalazae, those opaque ropes that attach the egg's membrane to its shell, I need a solid tether to fix me in one place. The husk breaks in uneven patterns to present a golden orb. I risk fracture to reveal my center. I seek the splitting of my rigid encasement.
The return is instinctual. I want the solace of slipping into the past with a lover that whispered sweet soliloquies into my body. I crave the quiet comfort of dark brown sheets, the shadows of green vine woven around a window ledge, and steady rainfall to rouse me from slumber. Elements of home. Remnants of an identity I parcelled and shipped to the nether regions of the wilderness.
Is anxiety a condition of unrequited longing?
I must forget to forge forward. I cannot keep the contradiction between what I was and where I am. I carry the ocean in my body; each wave crests and feeds the ecosystem of my soul. The melancholy is my own.
This experience was a significant undertaking in setting boundaries. I will stand a little on the side, over here, and you will stand a little towards the opposite side. I break the mirror that others present to me. I dance along the rim of conflict. Friendship is precious—the meeting of beings that respect the space each holds in their rotation.
Venus considers retrograde rotation; a Venesiuen year is 225 Earth days.
It takes me longer to come back to neutral if the splitting is wide by someone else's hands.
Photo source.
