I once spent a lovely spring day traipsing through the woods with a dear soul friend who had saved my life by existing.
Fellow survivors look as each other and wink - they too have been to hell and back. Hells built and filled with hot hate of others dark realities the world offers on paper plates that can't hold the weight or those silent, dark hells we create for ourselves. The silent ones; the ones with the hidden crevices, the veiled river of memories, the places we go to sulk or scream
but only inside for outside is gray order. NOTHING out of place.
We had met there, on the edge of the gray. That day was to take us from there to the life, the colors, feelings dug up on sandy bottoms of deep lakes and brought up for a view of the sun held in a perfect sky. We hid in the woods for weeks, at first, bonding with conifers, sleeping on their discarded foliage. Mornings were brutally bright but full of promise. Escaping to the beach one day, we saw our next refuge.
The lake had hauled great branches from distant shores and strewn them about the soft white sand in cavalier piles. To us they were the remains of great, majestic beasts that were no more. Creeping among them, caressing their worn limbs, we could see stories of lives longer our mere craniums could conceive of. The wooden bones of once vertical wonders were our kin. And we honored their passing.
As we walked along the beach so soft and so white we had no choice but to be swept up in full daylight and being alive. A parade of green grass called to us and we ran like children.
Green.
All greens.
Every green.
On each blade of grass within this cloistered lawn was revealed the pageantry lady nature presents to those who bend low and look through lysergic eyes. Every blade was it's own shade of green. The color of life. The color of wellness. The color of my eyes. As we lay with our backs crushing the soft blades, the sun danced above us and the trees sang, each it's own voice but in harmony. Their voices soft whispers that could rend a soul sane.
The sanity was more than I could take.
On the edge of our glade, a sculpture had been erected. A crude thing. No art to it. No song. Metal jutting out of the earth at painful angles as chains hung in ordered rows. The chains had their own burdens. Burdens I happily placed my ass on and my angel and I began to swing.
The trees thrummed a new song, the sun did a jig and we swang until we grew up. But as we now walk the land among you, know that our bones are made of stories. We still pull the occasional resinous needle from our hair. We hear the trees wondrous songs play ever on. And the gray silent hell can not call us back anymore.
