Melancholy Trail

The question stays, loud or soft — always, always there: am I running to or away?

Grass rippling in time with waves, I watch water and flora follow steady pulse as they always do. Forgetting they also hold their own private worlds as I do, I grow distracted by orange and blue shadows cast by cold sun. The rasp of grass speaks to their tired day, to my tired bones.

It would be easy, if what I held was melancholy. A lovely sounding word — tidy, easy to make pretty, easy to maintain. It belongs by the seaside or down a forest trail coated with powdered snow. Melancholy is not ugly depression which settles into bones, makes my bed smell of sadness, bring numb tears I can’t explain or do away.

Neurons and dendrites follows the sun as it pulls and presses away and toward. Discordant functions, reactions, displays. Equinox to equinox — a gradual decline. Solstice to solstice, diminuendo to lowest low from highest high — crashing internal before crashing intangible structures connected through me. Seasonal changes in the wrong body.

So on coldest days I seek out the sun still to remember kinder days in understanding how temporary misery is. I walk Melancholy Trail. Outpaced, out-strode — a time to pretend, forget — where I once was and where at once I am; thoughts left on concrete buried by sand til it sticks again to my dusty shoe returning to my bed and screen.

The birds will soon return; bickering, crying, singing, calling. Warmth signals return to life.

Shorebirds will outrun waves to pluck their food. I return once and again and over — trekking long along cold beach, high summer dunes, seas of grass. Miles on miles trudged, padded, sliding down soft sides outpacing racing thoughts of dread, anguish, anger, memories buried clawing out of taut nerves—

Solicitude is another pretty word; cadence slipping, tapping off tongue and teeth. Slipping and tapping just as easily as ruminations circle, spiral, tangle; inviting along Melancholy for they share disquiet and misery all the same — permanent residents through way of squatter’s rights; illegitimate yet protected all the same. It remains all the same. Now tempered by psychoactives prescribed and pithy words — mantra. Melancholy, solicitude: the masks and garb of anxiety, depression.

Fluttering whistle of flight of the white winged scote. Pitch pine in near perfect corkscrews to escape the tireless wind. Parabolic dunes sweeping, hiding feral horse and vernal pool. Choked by salt spray rose and poverty grass, melancholy accompanied by solicitude, lie along the Trail more easily than I lie to myself while I saunter gracelessly through soft substrate. The Melancholy Trail leads past myself back to the living where dread still dwells but in balance; no longer in burden; going to, not away.