***
You wouldn’t believe
I left this collection of letters
unwritten in
for seven years.
Because
you didn’t have to wait that long.
Seven years
passed
in the flick of a page
or the tap of a button–
hey, did you know
demons and dragons
(the ones I’ve met)
haven’t digitized their libraries yet?
Never mind, that’s not relevant,
except,
it’s sometimes ironic,
the things immortals who use magic
don’t come up with
because they’re
okay with how things are
and just
don’t have a reason
to invent
stuff.
This isn’t relevant.
I was writing about
the years between us.
But why should it be relevant?
I’ve basically got
all time
to get around to relevance.
Seven years, twenty-seven hundred…
unless something
comes and kills me
on purpose
or the fates have something to say,
I could live
for a very long time. Probably.
Draining life makes you almost immortal
except not quite.
Right, but anyway,
I didn’t write a letter
for seven years
because I was like,
Clarissa is
gone.
Stop
writing
letters
to
her.
She
never
would’ve
read
them
anyway.
And you’re never going to get
a silly series of letters
published in a grand dragon library.
Why, they probably have so many records
going back far enough
from enough realms
that this whole
“Human who becomes a witch and realizes she can live for eons
has a crisis about the meaning of life and what happiness is
if existence just goes on forever,
so she tries to ruin the whole system of destiny
to satisfy her whimsical cravings for power and fun,
cuz what else is she going to do with all that time?”
journey has been collected by a librarian and put on a shelf and
crumbled to dust
then been written and collected again
at least a dozen times. Fifty times. Infinite times,
really,
if the fate strings
just repeat themselves
over and over
(have I
repeated myself
over and over?).
So I gave up writing;
I may as well do something different
from all the records
by leaving an incomplete one
that intrigues historians’ minds for centuries.
What were the Witch Kook’s true goals?
Was her plan successful?
How exactly did she die?
And if this book
gets half-buried in a cold desert
and recovered years down the line
they’ll probably think she died there
but then wonder,
Where are her bones?
(Maybe, they’ll say,
she dropped the book
and went to a sunny realm
to drown herself.)
Well, the historians
don’t have to wonder yet:
I still have this book.
I’m still alive.
And my plan was not successful
to find the fates.
I could never catch karma in the act
of punishing me,
or get a lead
on the strings.
I don’t even care
that much
about the strings,
honest–
it was just
something to do,
just something
to get my mind off happiness
since I heard somewhere
the best way to find happiness
is to quit searching for it
and just let it
follow you
on your journey,
but wherever I heard that,
whoever I heard it from,
they’re a rotten liar–
it probably
only works for magicless mortals
in such a rush under the clock
that they can’t
check over their shoulders
every other step
and wonder
if it’s coming after them yet.
So I guess
the real way to be happy
is quit searching after something
so big and grand as fate
and just
stick your head in the sand.
Those tree folk
without running water–
wow,
imagine
having such
simple problems–
problems
rooted in survival–
that figuring out
where to get water from each day
takes up all the time
you’d otherwise use to sit around
questioning the universe–
arriving at more questions and dead ends,
scaring away happiness
by all that noisy searching–
so when you go to bed at night
you’re just glad
you’re alive
still;
like,
you found water
today,
and drank it,
and that’s enough
to make you happy–
they had it pretty good,
didn’t they?
***
Ps, Graveyard of Lullabies will be available as a free ebook on Smashwords from Dec. 12th to Jan. 1st.
Jordyn Saelor 