Epilogue: What the Poem Might've Said
A soft glow wakes me up. As her pen continues its journey, a scene begins to take shape around me. Cedar, beech, and sugar maple saplings spring from the ground. Without hesitation they grow and swell until reaching their full potential, towering above me as if I had stumbled upon an old-growth forest. Lanterns hang from their lower branches. Strings of beads connect the space between adjacent trunks, wrapping around their tall wooden bodies like a colourful, solenoidal belt. Leaves plucked from the deciduous trees are attached after every 10th bobble.
Festivals of leaves and trees,
She moves her pen back to the left side of the page, like an old typewriter being reset after its ding.
“Why am I here?” I ask, but she cannot see nor hear me. The world beyond her seems foggy, unformed. She continues scribbling, working slowly as the words arrive to her from their home of Nowhere.
The sun sulks low on my horizon, tinting the sky with inferno hues before a deep indigo seeps in, like the dye of a new shirt bleeding into an unlucky sock. A feeling of warm weightiness that until now had been persistent, wanes with the onset of nighttime.
Now being conscious for more than a moment, reality outside my pocket of existence is becoming clearer. I feel like a patient testing new pairs of glasses. Her sense of clarity might not be much more than my own though, in the grand scheme of things.
“Do you feel the same way as me? Are things foggy to you too?” I ask, once again trying to connect without success.
have much more meaning than nights like these,
I prefer this forest to where she is right now, too. I can tell she is on a busy, smoky street corner; there is lots of movement just beyond my depth of field. The Sun set long ago where she is. I gaze away from her table, up at the garnished trees which are now only dimly illuminated by a cloudy moon.
I can now smell the forest, the yummy dirt scent. I move to one of the sugar maples and sniff the bark, a sparkle of sweetness subtly tinging the crisp, clean air.
The comma in her lines make me nervous, not knowing what is to come. Suddenly, I notice a clearing through the trees. I step into a meadow full of flowers. The grass feels soft, inviting me to sit down and relax.
A branch cracks. I look up to see a man walking along the perimeter of the clearing. Just as I think he will pass right by, he pauses, and turns to face me. He comes and sits down, looking both at me and through me.
we’d sit in a meadow, so at ease,
if you’d look my way and notice me.
Finally, a period, signifying the end. But what about her? I leave my new friend, quickly winding my way back to where I awoke. But he is here, too. Except he’s real this time, standing and watching her write a poem for him.
She’s done writing my story, it’s time for me to be read by someone new.
The last thing I see is her smile as I’m folded up and gifted away.
gummygunk
annaxmalina
2087
blakekathryn
kaledo-art