
Trying hard not to think,
Under the far reaching branches of the tree whose name I can’t remember,
The benches and the swaying branches are silent,
Leaving space infinite for the voices,
The ones I was trying hard to avoid.
My companions came to join me.
In as much as I had tried to drown them in quiet.
They simply settled wordless around me,
and too watched the branches sway,
and the dust from passing minibuses glide through the sunlight columns,
I knew their names, and was accustomed to their company.
Fear was the first to action,
A blade protruding from a wooden handle settled in my palm.
engraved in it the word ‘relief.‘
“It would be easy. Nothing else has been easy.”
I turned it over in my hands,
felt it’s weight and sighed.
It would be easy.
Disgust saw my resolve slipping,
and before my eyes danced a thousand memories.
A million instances of shouldas and couldas,
Trillions of ifs and maybes.
“Was it all someone else’s doing?
Do you deserve easy?”
Do I really? Does anyone?
Sadness came in to comfort,
holding me close so that tears could flow and I could sniffle unashamed.
This was weakness,
but what does it matter?
Weakness more than anything should be a right.
A place of unfettered access when one is forced to come to terms
with ones own limits.
We are all limited, are we not?
Anger placed on my lap a scroll,
Tied with a ribbon of red on which was written “Experience“.
I had survived this long,
clawed all that was good that I had out of the clutches of doubt and shame,
hadn’t I?
Wasn’t some part of that worthy of continuation?
Unfurled the scroll showed a river flowing onward into death,
and my place marked with a question.
“Where to?”
The tributaries of past experience splashed with color,
Indigo, reds, yellows and blues,
a code of good, bad and ugly,
attached at it’s bottom a quill.
I invited them to come with,
and we struck a path in the direction not yet blotched with memories.
Them keeping pace with my slow steadying feet,
making light conversation,
as if now given name and purpose they were no longer my jailers,
but my comrades in arms.
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