Random Rantings on a February Night

Often she would sleep with her fists clenched. Like her sweaty palms were holding the pieces of her broken song. Then the fears would come, crawling along her spine, singing in chorus. That was why she was scared to walk into that void between consciousness and slumber. For some, it was just a moment. For her it was a vast chasm of chaos. A chaos that engulfed her and pulled every strand of her consciousness until she bled white. Sometimes the same nightmare would continue itself, night after night. Like a book you couldn't bear to read, but couldn't put down either. Sometimes, there were stories, incredible stories. A village of widows in China, a train robbery, a dying woman asking her to keep the bangles for her daughter, a stampede. They'd be vivid visions, coherent and frighteningly real. 

Some days she felt like she was sitting under a murdered tree in a desert, picking splinters from her soul. She would scrape her wounds for she could not bear the touch of them. They'd bleed and bleed and then make way for scars. She was covered in them now. Memoirs of the compulsive warrior, of the decay. 

She wanted to lie in an open meadow, just after it had rained. The grass beneath her would be wet and cool. The air would smell of redemption. She would lie there on her back, facing the tired sky. She would lie there until everything would fade into oblivion. 

But she found herself sitting in this burning moor. Next to her prayers, now scattered in unmarked graves. She wished they would find some peace but then, not everything gives up the way she does. Even her own creations. She had to slay their grieving hungry ghosts. Longing to prey upon the morsels of her hope. Oh how she wished they would give up. 

She was on the shore that night when the thirst overwhelmed her. The fool that she was, she drank from the ocean. Now she sits there in agony. Tongue bruised from the salt of the sea. Then the moon came and breathed against the waters, gently nudging them bathe her

roughened feet. She smiled at his endeavor. She was his beloved loony wife. The cause of his curse. She was the reason he would wane, and yet he loved her more every night. She hoped he knew that she wanes with him. That lovers carry every curse together.