Echoes

My thoughts fly up like birds in the sky.
I am free. I can fly.
I go everywhere. I see everything.
Towering mountain ranges
and a tiny flower growing in the desert.
I see cities and highways and a fallen tree
I see a grandmother telling a story to a child.
I sit quietly
But my thoughts fly up like the birds in the sky.
Only I know where they go.
When you sit quietly, where do your thoughts go?
What do you see?

I sat quietly leaving my thoughts to make their own journey. Orahjinn waited and watched until the tendrils of smoke had become a lace of fingerlets swirling around our ankles and growing thicker before we began to walk. It was a trip I must make on my own even as he accompanied me. He didn't take my hand to lead me but I followed at his side. We walked out onto the sea tomorrows where hopes and dreams find companion to their opposite.

It is a frightening place of unfamiliars, glimpses of what we know too slim and all that we cannot yet comprehend daunting as it looms ever closer. I heard the sound of wing before the vision of it emerged in the fog. A line of plane disturbed as it flew closer and closer still. It was coming. It was coming closer ... right to me and all I knew within no longer mattered but the instinctive nature of the creature that held my soul ... I would have fled had my feet not been bound by the mists themselves. There was only to lift my hand for its arrival and see its wisdom and hear its vision.

Three times the peck of its beak found my palm. The pain piercing itself free. Only then he did he turn and find me in the glassy eye. Did I comprehend? .. No said a voice inside of me, show these things to me. From the opening it began to pluck pieces of myself and pull them free .. juicy tender tidbits of heart and soul and willingness to thrive, the desires of a lifetime as a precious treat. Once freed it took to wing, flying back upon the mists that it had come. The echoes of the swamp rolling in the bright white darkness .. a cicadas thrum, a frog's riveted croak. Somewhere in the past that was to be the future of tomorrow something splashed and slithered its way nearer. And the cry of a gim hollowed across the marsh.

Three times the peck of its beak found my palm and empty it was when it returned. Such sustenance I proved to be for what lay in the beyond. I watched with fascination growing for all the bits the raven wished to procure yet to wonder where it was going when it was swallowed by the light. A slow and confusing clarity came quickly to mind. Is this what it was meant to be? Is this what Orahjinn had wished me to see? Butterfly flutters lit upon the cypress bough and swung from the mossy over hang, fusing into the branches as pretty as can be. A swirl of pale shades waved across the fog as it roiled and churned with stillness. I almost heard a voice whispering, but I knew it was wrong then I set it free.

Three times the peck of its beak found my palm and empty it was when it returned to me. I saw in blissful horror, stark obscurities yet to be. The raven pulled and tugged harder and harder the last of the nurture it needed of me ... the pain lit behind my eyes and clutched deep within my chest. And all the while the brightness fading, sinking deeper into the weeping of despair. The wash of the mist lapping against the shore, the wave of its emptiness breaking on debris. I watched as the raven set its course to fly away from me ... out into the darkness bright and blinding white. I knew where he was going and found only comfort that he would fill the belly of the prophet ... an oracle I could not be.

Orahjinn left me alone to walk the journey back with me and only as we stepped beyond the madness did he offer his hand to catch mine. In his dark brooding gaze I found a touch of cruel mercy, a cold kindness that was embracingly disturbing and maddeningly calm. Denial of the obvious, I clutched the pain tightly to my chest and set the rest to an echoing whisper.