velleitie
“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.”
Stones in the Sky.
The girl hears the bells chime as she gathers her things. There was never enough room to leave willingly. She fights for independence with orange lipstick and rings as thick as a knuckle. Her altar is a cemetery of bugs. All the offerings are made to the spiders, who treat the most annoying insects as nourishment.
Without a proper means to cook, the girl dips things into sauces. Bread. Crackers. Fingers. Carrots. Cucumber is her favorite and a rare treat. Water is harder to purchase and begging on the streets for a sliver of something wet was a well-known activity for those without riches. The wealthy left eons ago, each selecting a stone in the sky to cart their lackluster belongings.
Whatever you can carry—
Her guides tell her to put down the objects that do not belong, though the girl knows she could never sleep as easily without the nightmares. It soothed her to take the pain and put it in her body. She turned the dark, oily coils that appeared in the dream state into long ropes of blue sparkles. As she breathed deep, she pictured the light shimmering inside her body, moving like a river down her thighs. When the glow was warm and tingled, she knew it was ready to be released into the world of form.
She’d open her eyes wide to the black slate and push with all she had.
Assertion and force are not synonymous; where one affirms, the other negates. The key is through Aikido, the art of moving with rather than against one’s partner. The girl had a sound teacher that taught her how to use the force of one's opponent to their advantage. Before her lessons, the girl shoved back as hard as she could. Now she knew to roll to either side or pull as her partner pushed.
Power is precarious as wind.
When the wealthiest left, the rubble remained intact for whoever could cart the brick and plank to craft a hut. White ash coated the streets until the trees waved and the rains arrived. It was an unusual event that lasted several minutes. Just long enough to wash and fill a few buckets. The people carried metal wands with a hook to cleave into the trees. A narrow spout presented the water drawn from the roots.
The tree's tears were the only salve to dehydration. It didn’t take long to suck a tree dry, and you could hear the snap and shudder as the tallest fell to the Earth once broken by aridity. People prayed for the trees instead of themselves, believing in a collective symbol of hope instead of their individual longing to live.
So many had lost their lust for life.
Not the girl.
She slept in dank caves and discovered small blue flowers growing in the rotting moss. Life flourished underground and she clapped for the larvae wriggling and writing their bodies on the hard Earth. Cracks appeared from the lack of moisture, and the girl heard a low hum that stuttered into the clay in the spaces. Something spoke deep down in the tunnels, and the girl knew if she followed the sound, she would discover the answer to the problem of the Earth’s decay.
No one wanted to seek the answers any longer. The people stopped listening. Growls and shrieks lit their bodies with fear, and the collective turned themselves off one by one to avoid the pain. They were no longer a sentient species; few remembered the body's rhythms. Especially those who left. Before they fled the First World to the stars, the wealthiest had traded sensation for presentation.
The girl was one of the last few who kept herself open to the intense pleasures and pains expressed by emotions. Her own and the other breathing beings she felt in the rocks, bark, and moss. The First World was still breathing, be it only in gasps and croaks.
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
As the bells clatter like a parched throat, the girl whispers to the blossoming luminescence. She rose to wander the fading paths and deadened trees, knowing that the waking hours would not provide the resolution she craved. She travelled to locate the next crevasse where she would sleep and enter the the unconscious realm.
Intuition binds us as a community; to the underground of the First World where history is recorded in the soft putter of stone.
She never bothered to ask who kept on ringing the bells each morning.
Sometimes, the most obvious evades us.
Photo source.
