The morning air was cold in the forest.
Sweeping black wisps in a microscope lens, her eyelashes outlined a delicately illuminated tapestry that reflected back. When sunlight brushed them, a feathery frame changed; from crows flying to a gilded insect’s wing. Laurel’s icy fingers fiddled the tubes, aquamarine humming with rusty umber. In a warm mist of exhalation, dawn quietly unfolded into a cacophony of colors that flowed and collided in metamorphosis. A self who is and is not - fluidly interconnected here nor there, alive nor dead. Revelations echoed in the hall behind a closed door. Falling asleep, the earth turned. Waiting for wings, to remember or not. Flutes echoed mournfully in the forest that day.
Late autumn leaves muddled under her boots as she stepped over dew-beaded clovers, eager for warmth. Her canvas stretched across velvet pillowy mosses, crawling over pastel blue and pink linen rocks abundant with ancient fossils and lichen, phthalo and quinacridone. Colors swam in waterfalls over the white noise. Water wrapped each rounded stone like a gift, carrying the rains to elsewhere. Tied together with root ladders of grandmother trees, who spoke quietly and whispered secrets.
She wondered who she would love, how many. It was difficult to not be pulled back from here, now. Now. Now… Back then, soon. It was difficult to think of anything else but this: the cells and molecules danced in the sun, exuberant, entirely animate. They all called her name, over and under and in between. Her limbs ached with longing and belonging.
The birds fell silent. The hushing whoosh of water and wind lulled.
Ornate filaments of starlight filtered through the last trails of fog. Every inch of the forest was overflowing with love. Colors moved independently of their origins. She could stand here every day, chart all of the comets and meteors, earthworms and beetles. The trees wrapped their boughs around her, reverent and wistful. The art of existence is a radical, transcendental, immanent one.
Slowly, she became a tree. To be regarded, to be kept. Regarding, keeping. Regardless of what happened in her story, she could lay down on the mosses and close her eyes. Wild grasses would reclaim her heart. Forest mice would build their nest in the cave of her ribs. Love would go on.
She whispered her prayer to them, the mice. Shadows slowly crawled. The trees seemed to bend lower, listening, thinking. She hummed a lullaby to the fog and the dew. How she would see her friends again soon.
Laurel recalled her first memory of dirt, gardening with her mother and overturning a stone. Mesmerized, she drifted in thinking of her birth, her land, clover's grasses sprouting over her hands like clouds eclipsing the sun. Something that didn’t hurt. Maybe she would photosynthesize, warp the light around her body. Become the light. Heal. Turn iridescent. Make something new.
The thrush thrush thrushing of her brush on the cloth mirrored the contours, pushed the pigments into vibrant vibrations.
“Are you listening?” Laurel’s eyes drifted upwards, her painting half-finished. The bristles clouded a glass of river water, clinking against the glass rim as sediment settled like smoke. “Does this matter?”
We held your feet when you were born, bathed in us. We remember.
Her irises stretched deep enough to swim in. The forest held them in her hand like cool water.
A sunny patch of grass tilted into sunlight. Sunlight tilted into a sunny patch of grass. Laurel lifted her gaze, observed the highlight of each mountain and valley in her fingerprints. The dirt from planting. The body of earth. She felt her own hands, twisting like gyroscopes. Like parchment, she thought. Scraped clean, hung, taught to dry. Waiting for a divine word to be scrawled on them, charmed lilies proliferating the margins. An illumination, an unveiling, an apocalypse? The word of a god, punctuated by freckles and scars. Unspoken, eyes closed under dirt. There may not have been twice as many stars, but her book still felt light on her skin.
She did not question why one tree bent this way towards a patch of sun, or why the barks all felt different under her hand. She accepted them for trees. To be fossilized, to burn, to decay. A fleeting thing, she embraced her verdancy. The moss agate bookends were on the shelf with white painted trim. Collecting dust, written, unwritten. Known, unknown.
Turning the page, her arm swept over the sun, smearing light down to a glowing understory.
