Number Forty Nine ©

Atee rested on a high place. but couldn't jump. Somewhere she wanted to jump, somewhere she knew it would happen. Somewhere the light switch was off, somewhere she couldn't see her head in the mirror.
She stared straight down. It was heavier than she was. Maybe she could float, like a boat.

She turned away. She hadn't reached the top yet. Higher she would endeavour. Trek into the heavens. Atee looked up, up and away.

Multiple springs bubbled with gas. Atee would never see them. Atee would climb back down. What had taken a hold of her, brought her back to a high place.

She looked out over the bottom. If she looked straight ahead she could neglect this drop. It wouldn't eat her alive. She allowed dignity to slide off her shoulders.

"There is no going back now" Atee whispered to her ears.

No manifestation of her own could save her now. Not a single ghoul or soul could swoop down and lift her again. Not a cloud could fall, not a sky to cry for her.

She put her eyebrows together, and stepped. She lost her sense of goals, her orientation was liquid flowing. The pit welcomed her. Atee was dethroned from her high place.

It would happen again. And when life stroked deep, warm breaths through her, bells wouldn't ring. And when a soil field felt hurt by her, when she didn't reach to make an open relationship with an open, empty hand, a presence would reciprocate a slash of negligence and blindness for her.
When tunnels collapsed before her and bridges turned to ashes, she realized she was wrong when she thought she could always say "I can". Sometimes, she knew she couldn't.

When a desert brushed footprints of hers away, when a blizzard erased her tracks and rain washed away and sponges scrubbed away, she would land like a branch from a tree.

Over precious rounded stones. She saw the process of erosion, she felt it like attrition when she ached. She felt herself rounding away, smoothing and polishing. Like a stone, she carried herself like a locket, or a ring or a jewelry box.

She spoke and everything was busy. She closed her lips and the roots absorbed more nutrients. So soft, this presence catered to her, just as it touched everything, all the others and all the "not yets".

A knock on her door summoned her to come home. She knew she would arrive late. The lights would be low, the music would be dying.

Her prism was incomplete.

Atee wiggled into a cozy, baby sweater. She sipped coffee like her grandmother. Trees outside the windows filtered wind to jingle chimes through the passage of an open door. Colored glass bent light, grandmother looked silly with a multicolored face.

Together, Atee watched two falcons hunt and prey.

Atee would never forget to be receiving to blessing. Atee reached a gloveless hand into the fountain of inspiration. A little now and then kept her heart in a spiral of passion. No corners or edges.

All on one, Atee designated a team captain from the best looking specimens in her garden. A brown beetle and a swarm of bees. "How will I ever get these two to compete?" She thought.

She wouldn't take a leadership role again. Electrifying hears and minds she could leave to the military.

Ahead of her sense of self, an endless angle. She couldn't get out and measure it, she was an unmoving, static vertex. Just one among infinity.
No sides, no curves. Just a hanging tiny circle to the upper-right of a number.

With a pair of scissors, Atee could do some things she wouldn't dream of.

From hand to hand she could experience existence. She didn't need a sundial or a bucket. Filling something with emptiness, she could sell it to a hole. She carried dice in her hands, she lived out loud, she bathed in sun juice. She punched sorrow with her knuckles, she ate with a spoon, she read in the darkness.

A belief in forever distracted her from the forever now. She sat under an apple tree, with a basket to catch the falling apples, philosophizing about apples. "What to think?" She should have asked. Instead, she thought of the core and the skin as she sliced it with a blade. Too much energy she wasted altogether under a simple tree in the midst of light.

Even as the earth gave its charity to all of space with its vines and grapes, stars continued to explode and forget to care. Outside the beautiful sphere the earth provides, is a non-sharing volume of chaos.

Whatever was tickling Atee was just enough. She fell onto the ground, she screamed with laughter. Her head disappeared. She looked like a dancer as she tried to escape whatever had its fingers poking at her.
It stopped and she opened her eyes. It felt like the first time. Where everybody was, was in communion with one another sharing and enjoying the company. Her breath returned and her grace poured out.