flight
Tracing my line over it, again and again. I try to memorize its shape and texture, or to give it such, or to deny it such. I like the way it feels on my fingertips. I like the way it breathes in and out of my skin, mingles what was mine before, and just and soul and sole and so.
Tracing around it, discovering its contours. I make it like a bed, tuck it in at the corners in gentle, loving box pleats, fluff what might be fluffed and smooth what might be smoothed. It looks lovely there, in the center of the room, waiting to be unmade again. A well-made bed.
Placing a piece of thin paper over it, rubbing at it until it comes through, a shadow of itself that is somehow the more apt, the more precious in its rendering, in its distance. First with this, soft and gray and erasable. Then with some bit of shockingly colored wax.
Carefully folded, this thin page, this little layered etching could take flight, could soar around the room once or twice, pick up a breeze, even, from an open window and find its way around the house, down the street, through the world.
It's not easy, but it's possible.
Tracing around it, discovering its contours. I make it like a bed, tuck it in at the corners in gentle, loving box pleats, fluff what might be fluffed and smooth what might be smoothed. It looks lovely there, in the center of the room, waiting to be unmade again. A well-made bed.
Placing a piece of thin paper over it, rubbing at it until it comes through, a shadow of itself that is somehow the more apt, the more precious in its rendering, in its distance. First with this, soft and gray and erasable. Then with some bit of shockingly colored wax.
Carefully folded, this thin page, this little layered etching could take flight, could soar around the room once or twice, pick up a breeze, even, from an open window and find its way around the house, down the street, through the world.
It's not easy, but it's possible.