Green

A dot on a map, pages of my past with the corners folded, reread and reread and...

Revisited, taking the time to touch each flicker of magic more gently each time. Dandelion seeds dancing around me. A grey sky shouting promises of healing. The roads that used to be just bitumen and are now the veins leading to my heart.

I can't help gushing at the rain that falls like confetti, welcoming me back to my refuge, washing the anguish away, beating down the hopelessness, letting something brighter grow.

Hills roll like thunder, crest like waves, fill my vision like tears.

Waterfalls whisper to me, pressing secrets against my skin like band-aids, urging me to always hold them close, to let them guide me.

My bitumen veins twist through rainforest, leading me between swaying trees, under rustling leaves, over memories that are felt more than remembered.

A bird calls, crooning a chorus in time to my frolicking heartbeats. Contentment answers, bubbling up inside me, exploding out of me in a curve of my lips.

My medicine is water in the ground's basin, lush rainforest encompassing it - layers of gift-wrapping. It swallows me whole, expelling my melancholy, my misery, my despair, filling up sorrow's lungs until it has sunk to the bottom, doomed to decay.

Each time I emerge, my eyes are brighter, thoughts more luminous, face glowing.

Green was the ground, steady and vibrant beneath my bare feet. Green was where I built fantasy lands in my mind. I stormed castles and charged onto battlefields until it was dinner time and I had to tuck my other life back into the creases of my mind, ready to pull out again later.

Green was all I knew; something taken for granted because I had never lived in shades of brown. Happiness was all I knew; taken for granted because I had never inhaled true sadness.

Years later, green turned a more vivid shade, morphing into nostalgia - choking me and simultaneously pumping air into my lungs. Green was a place I could only touch in my dreams. Green was the sunlight at the end of the tunnel, imperceptible to me but inarguably existent because I had once spent every moment beneath it.

Green was rain and hills and lakes. It still is. It is still craved but no longer needed like oxygen, now only longed for like warmth. It is not my only shelter now, rather a haven that might always be my favourite.

Green is a blanket placed intimately around my shoulders, a candle waiting to be relit whenever I need it, a book with a dusty cover that will always have the prettiest words on each dog-eared page.

Green is a small town. Green is home.