The Slight Possibility

Are there ways to stand amongst fallen leaves – those that are decaying – and not be heard? Is it possible for the wind to blow without moving someone’s hair across her face, whipping it over her mouth in the attempts of suffocating her? Can I… or she or whomever I speak of truly become lost in thought? So lost that the labyrinth of the mind becomes longer and more impossible to escape from than the Minotaur’s? Worse than that maze, and without thread.

I, her or we… whichever term should be used, believe that these things can happen, but only when you aren’t aware of them. I cannot hear myself, a breathing figure, lonely in an autumn landscape and the hair on her head is violent in the wind, attacking her face, her eyes and yet, she doesn’t blink, but stares on blindly. That endless maze in which our minds are racing, is trying to fight against finding that new memory we’ve hoped to forget. Still, it’s there at every dead end. Why is this world, my world, so cruel to me and my brain? So cruel… and unfair.

I think wearily of the past. The Late, the After, the Few-Seconds-Ago… all of them cramped into that four letter word. I’ve been asking myself how to move on from every one of those evils that have taken even a second’s place of my life.

I simply cannot.

And I know why.

I do dwell on my history when, really, only the ability of being present in the present can show me where to go for my future. How can I see the door in front of me when my eyes are looking out the back of my head? There are no answers that I need below that trapdoor that I’d climbed through to get to this moment in my life. Here. Standing amongst fallen leaves – those that are decaying – on this hill in the woods. Here, where I can see more hills and more valleys, more trees and more leaves, and tucked within it all, by a hidden lake, lays my home with a mournful dignity. I see beside me, my deaf sister – her hair swirling about madly and I imagine it tighten around her throat. She cannot hear me standing here. My sister, my leaf, whom I have learned… has cancer.

Luna