SHORT STORY
I remember very little of my childhood, so I won't start there. Instead I'll begin when I first started to live.
Once upon a time there was an older lady, grey in hair and beginning to spot with age. She was a sad one, had been on and off, on and on throughout her life, floundering in the deep waters of unknowing.
Until one day, she came up gasping for air and gazed at the huge airy shell above, covered in beautiful blue, white fluff drifting with sighing winds, playfully gliding.
She stretched out her hand to catch the fluff but couldn't reach. So she looked further down and saw brown fingers joyfully outstretched. Bright iridescent greens uncurling upwards to reach the shell but they couldn't reach either.
But they were not sad, just stood, faces shining in a warm and beautiful emanating light. They couldn't move either, rooted to the Earth. But that didn't make them sad too, they just were and were...
And lowering her gaze, this one who had been sad on and off, on and off all her life, saw, meandering among those roots, tiny spikes. Spikes of more green, pygmy spears pointing upward, but too short. Oh! Far too short to reach either...
Yet they too were radiant in glorious glossiness and vibrancy of life. Living, growing, expanding but she, the surfaced sad and older one did not see the contracting that came with each expansion. She only saw the vibrancy of the grasses knowingness of life.
She did not see the curling-in of the bright iridescent leaves on the brown fingers, the age spots mottling them until they fell in aloneness from the tree.Nor their shooting pains to reach the sky and the ringing of their bark, ageing, ageing, dying...
The trees were content, the fluff oblivious as it played. And the grassy spikes just growing, until snatched off in prime by a passing creature.
But there seemed no place for her here, all so content, no sadness. No place for her.
So she took another lungful of the fresh life-full air and with a whispering dying sigh, fingers outstretched towards the blue, slipped beneath.. Back, back down to her fathomless chamber of existence. Until one day, the blue shell and fluffy companions, the brown fingers and green spears became just a distant memory in her watery grave.
2003