And here was evening, on the first day

A STORY


She turned toward me. Eyes old and wise, yet I have the sneaking suspicion they have always been that way. The places around her mouth weren't framed in laugh lines, but her eyes were. She blinked and said to me;

"We thought the old dogwood died last year, at the turn of fall to winter. I spent a childhood (and how long is that anyways?) wandering under its heavy boughs. A thousand years, please, I asked when the morning began to end. but instead it fell apart; like the peal around the oranges purchased in large cardboard crates from the baseball boys every January. Ah this isn't so bad I said, and lifted up my hands to the sun directly above me. Regardless of the talk I clung to my mother's breast and inhaled deeply. Hay, lipstick and dryer sheets.
What I saw first was never the moment but always the gentle nudging of the arriving moments, rendering the Final moment king. Growing up, (and how far up is that, anyways.) I never cried in movies until the very end, when el fin would move across the screen. Rolling cumulous clouds gathered in the sky in those times as well, always the precursors, they formed and collapsed giving way to more stable forms of precipitation. Castles without substance, I said, and sat beneath the dogwood tree which was always there with its branches of shade, my arms around my blooming knees.

Oh, they have always said that where your treasure is where your heart is also. And Hell, do I treasure my mind. But Hell do I feel, and that is my heart. Can you even see how this wakes me, and in the night tears me apart?

Give me a thousand years!

There is a desperate declivity at the end of things, and before then just guesses and stabs. When my mother died I guess a part of me died as well. I tried to climb back into the orange peels and roll up the fleshy sides until my fingernails stung. My mother always loved oranges.

There is a different sunset to each season, and that's how I knew it wasn't winter anymore when I took a walk this evening. Winter sunsets, they hang in the air intimately; illuminating both flaw and virtue in a thematic light. Things begin, however, to smooth and grow in the light of a spring evening. Thats when I noticed the tree for the first time in a while. Gravel on the pathway leading up to it, wind singing in the branches bare and raw. Except, my friends, for one, with a green tendril splayed out on the tip. A hidden pink all static within. A moment without the final moment  for once (and soon eternity) as the evening peel revealed the coming night.

They have always said that the heart lies where a man's treasure is. My mind is a treasure, I respond, but my heart devises my way. The Lord, then, must directeth my steps."

She ended her moment here, and then turned to walk away. Slow, I saw, and careful, but I suspected it had not always been that way. Once she was gone her rhythm however remained; peel peel peel. My heart saw. Peel peel peel, and a thousand more years!