January 10th, year unknown.
Soon there will be no more digital elegies for me to leave on the day the stars welcomed you.
Every so often, the stillness calls to be gently broken—by a quiet offering laid at the makeshift altar for those who once believed in myths and runes. A gentle knock graciously answered, with a few kind words uttered guardedly through the peephole in the door. Locked and latched as it ever would’ve stayed. We all have our limits, but yours are more than most. All this to say that I’m sorry it took me so long to see it your way.
The way you bury those tender things so meticulously, like ancient love sealed off in amber—not meant to be possessed (goddamn, now—don’t I know it), but rather hidden in the quiet caverns of the heart. And yet, she still seeks to break the spell cast over the memory: impossible, unspeakable, ungraspable. Like a mirror held up to the light, hoping to catch a shadow. Instead, she sees herself, her broken parts, the refractions of shattered glass, and in that a self-denied strength too. Her emotional courage, her frantic fervour, and fragile face mask the hot-blooded cunning of a fallen Queen gone astray. She plays the part, but she knows what she’s doing. She always has.
She delays endings as if she were Penelope, purposely weaving and unweaving words at her loom. Conjuring ancient languages long since put to rest. No real purpose now but to know that they were once spoken, once alive, once voiced by someone who mattered. That they weren’t just convenient elegies to bury the dead, hung like stars around overgrown burial plots, or worn as shrouds to conceal the decay. That she hadn’t imagined it—this once-burning thing. That her time on that treasure-filled shore wasn’t a hand-sewn fever dream, its memory rushing past as if it were sand in an hourglass that suddenly slipped through trembling hands.
Now she wakes in a bed far from Ithaca, far from a stone-faced, soft-centered Odysseus rightfully in retreat. Far from the sparkling snow globe world she only ever briefly holds in her palms, shaking it now and then when the moment calls. Fingertips tapping on the glass of another life to gaze upon the delicate, shining figures, to catch the glitter as it shimmers within the idyllic, frozen scene. She resists the urge to let her unhealed parts smash it to the floor just to set them free.
For a time it was magic. It was magical for a time. Maybe that was enough.
So what do you do with the phantom flickers of yesteryear? Perhaps make use of the old psychic timeshare, and take pictures with your eyes while you’re there. For every now and then, their thoughts still touched like ghosts grazing past. And there in the haunted space between them, she adjusts her crown as the other tilts his gaze behind horn-rimmed glasses to exchange a brief, knowing nod across the silver-threaded tapestry of some latent consciousness. Strange odysseys are almost always held dearer upon looking back with lighter heads and clearer eyes. They are not viewed as vacated visions, obscured behind clouded perceptions, or suppressed with a monastic wisdom that observes the candle, yet pretends not to feel the flame.
And now, with the final verse unwritten, the spell uncast, the thread delicately unraveled from the loom, she makes her way uncharted across the makeshift river chasm, where water flows freely under bridges and falls generously between outstretched hands. Every noble gesture recognized now for what it was all along—only now viewed from the beauty of an opposing shoreline.
For what it’s worth, I just thought you should know.
And if this message finds no harbour, let it still drift like all lost letters do, into the myth of something that was bigger than the both of us.
