The way every once in a while,
it catches the light and starts smoking.
For a while I tried to keep everything exactly the same as it was when they left.
I carefully tended to the plants in my parents room, which they hoarded the way others collected books. Every morning I opened the heavy balcony curtains to let the sea breeze and the sunlight in, so it wouldn’t smell stale like someplace unlived in. I kept the nursery (where my sister and I grew up) in the exact disorganized chaos it was when Avesta left. Every time I crossed the doorway, I stepped over the scarf she had dropped on the floor in a rush to get to the pier. To move it would be irreverent.
These little rituals held my battered heart together. But when I saw the eventide arch, something changed in me. I don’t want to say it broke my heart, that would be too dramatic. It was more like... I was living in the past, in the very moment my family set out to sea, and the arch brought me crashing into the present. It didn’t matter, all the stupid things I was doing so that everything would be the same when my family returned. The plants would outgrow their pots. My parent’s room would still smell like someplace unlived. Avesta wouldn’t remember the frivolous blue scarf lying in the doorway.
They would come home, and they wouldn’t care about what their rooms were like-- there would be a giant rainbow arch where there once was charred ruins. Oh, I could spend every waking minute holding back the tides of time, but what kind of life was that? Time always won.
Time always won.
I didn’t really want to talk to the unassuming stranger who turned away from the arch and was about to walk past me. But my eyes narrowed discerningly as I noticed his expression. I took a side step so that I was in his way. In hindsight it was rather comedically thuggish of me. Physically I was, in a word, weedy. All long knobby legs and tangled mane (just grown in!). Furfur was on the hunt nearby and I felt half the size without him. But in the moment, I thought stepping in his path was a simpler way of getting his attention than clearing my throat. I had a question to ask, and I asked it with the urgency of a child with no concept of how very long a life could be. “Why are you smiling if you’re sad?"
The way it will cleave and grow
like antlers.
A S P A R A
UNCLE @Asterion
