Harbinger

I remember color. The echoes of Then fill in hues my eyes no longer record.

-the bosc pear undertones on the wall behind the bed

-the tropically bright patterns of the cotton quilt

-your hair is likely the grey I see, but I remember the rich auburn you favored, a spill of sleep spun silk patterned on pale cream pillows.

I have not quite settled back into these taloned feet gripping the branch or the cold moon at my back.

Each Waking is confusion. I exist, briefly, between Then and Now.

Then,

is sometimes like a swirl of wind danced leaves, or oceans driven mad, boiling over innocent shores.

This Waking, my Then

is small fish in summer shallows, each flash and glint, a memory

-my mother's wrist bones turning as she taps a precarious ash from her cigarette

-the satisfying give of a tangerine peel

-the salted weight of unshed tears

On the journey from Then to Now, the first steps are always a jumbled flotsam of my humanity, random and unconnected, until the path begins to clear to a singular chain of events.

-The doctor explaining how the mycelium of cancer buried deep in my genetic code had been secretly blooming tumors

-Words, just words; metastasized, inoperable, aggressive

-Small numbers, 2-6 months, even stretched to 180 days, or 4,320 hours, small numbers

Pain can have fingers and teeth and live inside you deeper than a snapped bone; more relentless than a rotted tooth. The slurry of medication, is just a painters brush through hot colors, smearing the pain to abstract.

A fog of people roll in and out, bearing fear disguised as comfort. The emptiness of their words piles in the corners of a room that reeks of antiseptic and endings. My wasted body is a crucible, rendering selfish mortality to gilded ash.

I don't know when the Old Gods began calling. I woke night after night, twisted in sweat soaked sheets, to Their soft wild words, "Choose...choose, choose...Choose!" lingering vatic in the shadowed curtains.

In Now, I have heard a thousand souls leave a thousand bodies. In Now, my borrowed ears of forgotten gods can discern the grace of a dandelion seed pulled from her crown as clearly as the groaning crack of a river desperate to escape Winter's grip.

To hear the soul choosing to unmoor and answer the call, is to begin the Hunt.

In Then, when I chose, I woke to a different quiet.

I don't know the sound my soul made, only the choice.

I was small in a deep night of singing crickets and vast trees whose shimmering leaves brushed against impossible stars. No pain, but an electric need to run, to hide singing through my nerves.

Run, shadow to shadow; stop, freeze, run branch root, shiver; stop listen run run run

No more calls to Choose, the Hunt had begun.

All that I am is struck. There is no sound, only a small shift of air, and the icy fire talons breaking me. I am gutted and swallowed whole and everything that was me is Her.

We see into the deep forest shadows and hear a thousand tiny heartbeats. Color is gone, but We see starlight silvering tree branches and our fingers end in feathers. We are hollow boned and our feathers have a thousands of fine hairs to hold sound captive as We dip and push to the sky.

All my existence rests in Our belly, slowly rendering the muscle of my soul from the hair and bones of my life. The wind speaks to Us, and I know her soft language. The Wind and the Owl tell me I can let go and join the moonlight. I can be rain and earth and sky and everything wild.

When We rest again, at the roots of the Sacred Tree, We retch up what is left, my bones and hair and the teeth of me. All of the grief and laughter, all of the joy, and grace, and love to be given back to the Sacred Tree. All that holds me from the Wind and Wild is to be given back.

And here is the Now. One small bone I could not return.

That night of bonfire and friends and wine and love. That night of stars and laughter, when the barn owls landed in the trees above the house and called to us. We were struck silent in wonder and I reached for your hand and you were already reaching for mine. The owls called to each other, moving tree to tree, and were gone.

That small knuckle of time holds me here.

All the weight of the choice I wasn't, pins me to this cycle of Waking and Hunting. I have guided a thousand souls to the Wind and Rain and still I return to your trees to wait.

Choose and I will give you Wings and Blood and eyes that know Shadows. Choose and I will give you Wind and Wild and I will surrender myself,

finally,

to the Stars.