(invitation for your own excavation at the end)
When my heart leaves my body for a fraction of a second-
Even for a fraction of a second
Only for a fraction of a second
My chest cowers in the gaping hole
My limbs clench and huddle
To fill the space that cannot bear the breeze.
My mind panics like a parent losing sight of a child in a shopping mall
gravity and oxygen sucked from the atmosphere
heart beats in the ears
a frenzied search above and beyond the racks of clothes blocking sight
stores, a constellation of black holes
instantly filled with fright.
But my heart is a child that has never been free
A child that would never leave.
It tries with every primal pulse to live and see and be
To drink in the nothing and everything that sparkles above the trees
But it aches with the guilt of the limbs and mind
the body it left behind
It knows the truth
it’s never quite able to speak
it drips out like the blood of the deepest paper cut
It bleeds.
It comes in the muffled whispers of a child
who fears the very thing they know they must say.
And when the whisper stops
There is no time for play
the shadow appears
the mountain is near
It casts its coolness on the warm whispers of joy it seeks
It looms over my children playing in creeks
It swallows the light on their carefree faces
Innocent spaces
wide open places
It even swallows the sun sparkling on the sea
But that shadow is me
The mountain of me with limbs of trees
And the peak of my mind too high up for the air it needs
It thinks it can see all but it cannot breathe
And what is vision without the ability to be
And this mountain was born of the sea
The very sea who laps its waves across the base of me
Like a child tugging on the shirt of a parent panicked about what she didn’t see
But the parent is me
And the child is me
And the heart is me
And the trees are me
And the cut is me
And the blood is me
And the holes are me
And the sky is me
So if I can never truly leave
why does that feel so free?
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