Sunday, April 1, 2012

If I Could Climb

I want to climb a tree and find myself swaying in the uppermost branches, light and lean and sinewy.  My sick stomach and my unworthiness, fear, and shame circle and lay in wait for my descent.  Thankfully, the twisting, fluttering, baby new flags of leaves are a curtain, a cloak, a hiding place.

The character I imitate is fiction.  Her life, her world, her love, her fate.  I am not.  My heavy, draping form is nothing like her starved skeletal frame, yet I too know how to be hungry.   I have had "hollow days."  I too "am not really even that pretty."  I could be her ancestor, in theory.

No.  Why do I have to be real?  She is someone else's thought-up creation.  If I had complete license to render I would have written me so much better.  I know the birds and their songs, the plants and their names.  What good does it do me?  There is no application save knowing.  I have taken warm, pulsing life with my bare hands because it needed to be done.  I could survive without this modern world if it weren't for the venom in my head.

We sway in the new spring breeze, the trees and I, high over a quilted blanket of leaves.  Oh, if only the real flesh of my thick body could be in such a place and bend and dance with the wind.  Then the sun would shine and my tears would sparkle as they plunge down through the branches.

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