Member-only story
Canyon
My wandering feet thread the hems of these depressive slopes. It is strange territory for me. For one who lapses into pleasant thoughts at will, and conjures burning schemes and visions. One given to words that drown out the most threatening imaginations. One born with rose-coloured eyes.
Where did my joy go?
My wandering mind lingers, too long, on too much at a time. Not many things matter. I am used to the silence now. I breathe in it, I breathe it in. It wraps around me — suffocating, snuffing out meaning from everything. Up and down I walk, a thing in a trap. The door is there, open; the windows are there hung; but what kind of door lets out one trapped in his own misery, and what sort of window brings light into his endless gloom.
I recall a task once set by a friend — a writer too, of other things.
“Write about how it feels to have everything and have nothing at all,” she said.
Quick to task, I wrote of sadness hinged to meaning.
“You don’t understand it,” she said. “With these things, there may be no reason.”
It didn’t register on a mind free of clutter, alive to the world and busied away from looking into the yawning depth of his mind, that often, grief begs no meaning.
