23 Emotions: Énouement

This sorrow you hold now, close, 

it no longer has sharp edges or angles.

Raw has been rubbed down to a blurred sepia,

the wash of florescence, turned to warm glow.

A jagged spike, one of only a few,
in that otherwise arabesque line, of life.

Radiating out from the center contact,
each line, life, moving in kind, ever outward...

...but that one, almost parallel,
the line dancing, a twining counterpoint.

Such sweet melodies...

...and I am here to tell you (your sometime self)

hold on

hold on

you will get there, 
and with such magic.

Énouement

n. the bittersweetness of having arrived here in the future, where you can finally get the answers to how things turn out in the real world—who your baby sister would become, what your friends would end up doing, where your choices would lead you, exactly when you’d lose the people you took for granted—which is priceless intel that you instinctively want to share with anybody who hadn’t already made the journey, as if there was some part of you who had volunteered to stay behind, who was still stationed at a forgotten outpost somewhere in the past, still eagerly awaiting news from the front.

23 Emotions: Vellichor

Dust motes swirl around me
in a novel they would catch the golden sunlight, 
but this is not that.

Outside it's raining
drops spatter against the grimy window,
but the squashy chair is cozy.

Settled back against the cushions,
the light may not be golden,
but the feeling is.

Inhale...
a thousand stories are held in that scent,
(not just the printed words) but that of how they got here.

One blink of my imagination,
and I'm back on the other side of the glass.
(time has moved me forward) but the books are still there...

waiting,
waiting for a (glorious) dreary day,
of tea and reading.

vellichor

n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.

23 Emotions: Rubatosis

Home.

Shell.

Head tucked in,

burrowed.

The whisper of a heartbeat.

"Happy Anniversary"

it taps out in four-four time.

The cool night reverberates around me.

Home.

The dark canvas stretches above me.

(tap-tap)

The syncopation isn't here.

It was, once.

Round, and around

and back again.

Here.

Home.

(is it?)

rubatosis

n. the unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat, whose tenuous muscular throbbing feels less like a metronome than a nervous ditty your heart is tapping to itself, the kind that people compulsively hum or sing while walking in complete darkness, as if to casually remind the outside world, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.