Desolation Angel

1. 

I came across a picture of you the other day. The look in your eyes was soft, even tender. As always, my heart warms for an instant before the shock of cold truth freezes me through. A cruel trick of the mind. I never get used to it. 

2.

11:00  a.m. Concrete silence. That phrase sounds pretentious, but it's the only one I have. Lines of sun and shadow are creeping across the square, a slow and pointless chase that the shadow always wins. The severe geometry of this place suggests something, but what it is remains unclear. A vague memory of the afterlife, perhaps. 

My insignificance chafes at me. Not insignificance in and of itself, not in the Great Scheme of Things, but my inability to hold space in the mind of another. Do I really need to be seen in order to exist? Do I really need to matter this way? 

I curse myself for failing to fit the template, any template - if not desirability, then respectability - but this is a habit. Doesn't this free me from the risk of being an object, an empty stage upon which to act the same worn-out play? 

But I remember making this same argument, day in and day out, year after year. It sounds nice, but do I really think that one day my pure inner light will break through this grim façade and show me for what I really am? 

And what if - god forbid - what if your inner light had broken through and been found wanting? 

What then?

Then nothing, of course. Nothing. What is there to do? 

I might as well try to stop the sun moving across the sky.

I already told you. 

The shadow always wins.

In Memory Of Some Other Sunday

The Hawthorn And Jasmine Epiphany

It was the 12th of April, and I was weaving vines beneath  the afternoon sun. The day was strangely empty. I felt very alone. 

I paused for a moment, watching the finches and moths darting through the winter-scorched hawthorn. What would I do if I were so free? But no sooner had I thought it than I felt an invisible restraint tighten around me  A lifetime of training, my experience in a world of No. 

Ego-identity, woven tight as a corset. Woven by others, mostly, their projections and expectations, and now, I realized suddenly, I was confined by an identity that wasn't even mine.

It's not that what I wanted was wrong - I only wanted to follow the butterflies and be...I don't know...something that wasn't this collection of assumptions and do something. But there are things you learn out of habit, and always there had been someone to put up a hand to stop me. Always a reason why I couldn't, or failing that, an explanation of why I was somehow less than others who had done the same. For the first time, I think, I truly understood the reason why the freedom of my body depended on the freedom of my mind. 

I stretched out among the vines feeling so tired, enlightened but tired, and the same sun shone down upon us all, the moths and the finches and even something as small and pathetic as someone like me.