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The Belly of a Whale

A winter dream

By Diara Alvarado Published about a year ago Updated about a year ago 2 min read
3

There is a secret I've been scared to tell you:

Sometimes in winter, I dream I'm a ghost dissolving into frames, wilting in timelines from long ago. I weep at graveyards and weave like stagnant rain, irascible and tarnished. You're a ghost, too, all of your edges blurred and etched, but the candle of your heart is far too bright for my eyes. It looks like the moon, and I envy it. So I cry oceans and swallow the stars, hoping to be as vivid as you. Instead, I drown in my own solstice, and everything is spun in the ripples of your song.

Loneliness is the easiest thing to feel, and I've lost my name somewhere in the sandcastle we built as kids (perhaps it sunk with the ship that carried my heart because the lighthouse failed). I wanted to be a cartographer because I loved connecting lines and concentric circles. Now all I want is to study the trajectory of light, how your heart dances, and how the moon fully encompasses the ghost of you.

You say love is like magic because it sparks, and it is easier to sail in my own ocean and draw new fingerprints. But it is my dream, and you're just a guest. I can banish you and dissipate the letters of your name away from my tongue. (But I don't because I'm not that kind of a ghost. I'm a ghost that lives despite the relics of sorrow haunting me). I prefer to play pretend, hide and seek, and build myself a coffin with the dead flowers from the garden.

I tell you that I'm tired and want to go home to the little blue house with the swing set and the trees in the shape of giant hands, but my voice doesn't reach you. You're too busy making forest fires, the polar opposite of me, who's a black hole and the reason winter is so palpably cold and austere.

Grasshoppers scuttle at my feet, and behind my back, there's a flank of a mountain that's too much of a coward to touch the sky. Bare branches attempt a mere act of a hug, but I tell them that I'm okay, that I will wake up soon, that this is all just a dream, and that I'm not really a ghost.

surreal poetry
3

About the Creator

Diara Alvarado

Lover of animals and classical music. On a moonlit quest to become a writer.

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  • Damion Trimmierabout a year ago

    Amazing. Though, you clearly must be struggling with transparency ;)

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