January 10th, 2022/blood magic

Today’s Prompt: What are 5 things you’re grateful for today?

(I was feeling rather uninspired by today’s prompt, so here is a scene I wrote that reminds me why I’m grateful to be alive. Interpretations/thoughts always welcome!)

I trudge through these night plains. Clouds of insects guide my path. Dizzyingly, they flit about the fields, rising and falling over rock clusters and stretches of sand.

Crystalline blood marks my target, senses stretching a linear path between these quivering limbs and a child’s steady sleep. Stepping where winged creatures take flight, I squint at the starlit grasses and rocks and ocean’s shores.

Of dark terrain, night plains: to distract myself from the cuts up my back and the weakness in my knees, I hum. I name the sound prettier than buzzing insects, an actual melody instead of chaotic sound. My fingers flow like they could be a wind rushing through the reeds, rustling.

But the only music here on this plain, this night, is crunching footsteps, thousands of insect wings, and tapping tiny animal hearts. My humming dwindles a meager beauty. A pale thread in a midst of red.

My self wanders in this tapestry. A swirling whirlpool of blood pounding beneath skins, a city of textures. Soot. Sharp grass. Footstep-worn stones.

I float my palms together in front of me, like if I were stronger I could funnel a tunnel open through the insects. Like the glimmering lights could bob in cairn stones, marking my way home.

This is the tapestry. I am one heart, one blood, even when I bleed I color the floors only aquamarine. My magic is an ocean, there. Whirling in storms, fury, love. If everything so monumental that takes over my heart, my blood, could exist outside of me, I…I could join continents together.

I am one heart, one blood, flourishing with power, until I am too weak to keep walking.

This is the tapestry: I sit to catch my breath, heart a tempest, limbs quaking.

In a weaving, cloth threads overlap like twisted clouds, but never leak into other colors. This night, I belong in a city of textures, clouds of insects, if I were to remove myself from the pattern and step away all the textures might appear as one. A whole field made of swaying plants. A whole, before its parts. A cloud, before its insects. A rug, before its weaving.

But one insect knows nothing of another. The ribboning aquamarine in a midst of red might get named the snake in a fire, a river in an autumn forest. A whole, before its parts.

But I am only aquamarine. My whole being is merely a part. I could never step back and study the fire, the forest, see me as just a river snake. To me, I am an ocean.

What I mean is, the lie is we are all interconnected. We, who have never comprehended outside our own skins. We, who crave something called home because there we could never die and always remember.

“I am enduring” I whisper and the grass echoes back and that would be enough to last years longer than heartache. A desperate sort of freedom that our oceans are big enough to be whole worlds, beating as one, bleeding as one, coloring the floors with complete forests and rivers.

What I mean is, this seemingly grand power within me is only a part. And is hardly as powerful as I believe.

Dear innumerable dead, atop a singular planet: weave us together, your enemies and strangers, our colors crushing into ugly black, undazzling. Make us all one. Call us forever. String us up on a beam beside a fireplace, crackling. Leave us to disintegrate with months and moths and moments ever closer to crumbling.

And then, raise us from the dust so corroded and ancient we remember little more than our scars. Build us anew and let me go out into the world, crowned with eternity.