Desert Opium

She nourishes her skin every morning. She nourishes it with soft vanilla scented cream and calmed breaths. However, her hands stay dry as dead leather. The hands she uses to nourish the kilometers of skin wrapping her body are parched the same as the skin of a cinnamon stick. Which she uses to scent the controlled winds inside her home.

She sits by her towering window every day and feels herself belittle. Under the sun and below the stars that come passing by she looks at her brittle hands holding onto life.

Everyday she sits by the window, everyday just to sway a little farther away.

Her home is quiet, the air is untouched. The loneliness that conquers her longing guards the floors from the desert cold. Every piece of decoration, very much praised and exquisite just like the soap that melts down and crafts her frangible fingers. Her house is just like her and she is just like her house.

What lays beyond the pieces of glass that segregate her world is a desert, as rough by day and as cold by evening as her shriveled fingertips. A desert like no other and just like all the others out there beyond the comfortable greens of the forests.

Sand mountains shape her base, floating clouds announce a distant change.

A paradise of the immobile, a place that does not belong in moving time.

Her sacred remote island swinging with the waves of her mind is not to sink. Nothing to sink but herself. Her little archipelago drowns with her on top every time she sits by the window, every day just a little more. The desert has watched her swim along the opposing currents all her life. Only the sun knows what silhouette her shadow creates when she sits so intimately by her widow.

After all, it has been the sun and desert that kept her mind intact from the pure waters that flood it all. They kept her safe and dry from the soaking colds. She knows this as a fact and so, she waters her leaves no more. She keeps the venerated waters for the plants that accompany her walls and books. Columns of books which hold on their shoulders the stance of the very household. All which she wrote, millions of drops of water ago.

Her fingers are indeed dry, exhausted and revolted from dancing for her. Her words were whispered to be ‘Great Words’ around the nearest town drowning in the blasts of desert winds. Indeed, her writings were written quite long ago, when the paint of the walls in her oasis-like home were still fresh and flux. Indeed these Great books contain Great words of astonishment for intellectual power and creative fluidity. And indeed again, Great covers these books all have. Unyielding, like the rooms she commanded to be built and separated when she first dwelled in this desert looking for a space to fall.

Trapped in the middle of fevered warmth, she long ago set for the desert from her parents' land and spent every paper in her pocket for a sand house to rise up.

And it did rise from the core of the earth to shield her from the pouring rains that bestowed upon the easily influenced rivers. Just like the rivers that ran wildly inside of her from the water that we all carry and pour down on others and ourselves.

Upon her lonely essence, her words created roads to meet other sights. They baked her sugary cravings and satisfied her famished pages. She built empires of abundance and resilience and decorated them with color gardens and scented intent. Her words gave her a world in front of the ocean, on a green cliff.

Yet indeed, everyday she sits by the window and looks at her hands growing rotten roots as she prepares to write down the words that she is so called upon, the desert enters her home. Not by the front door nor the kitchen window but by the hollow cracks her hands are too tired to cover up. WIth her emotional anatomy deploying through the room, the chains of her words start to rupture. Entering whole and ravenous and sitting by her side, the desert asks her: “Have you saved up enough water for me?”.

Everyday, she prepares an answer, all different each time, all full of thirst. “For I am coming to you” the desert says before standing up and walking out.

She knows the waters to be all that which remains undomesticated inside of her. The unbearable and untamable truth of what she is, on the contrary to what her books read about her. She is a virgin ocean that listens to no one but the moon. She is chaos on an empty page no one gets to read. A phenomenon that sits quietly by the window each morning waiting for her mind to construct words of intelligent content. She came to the desert long ago and made a house of rich solitude to quiet down the storms she navigates through. In the middle of the ocean she stands all alone floating on a sand boat. “Great words must come out of me” she thinks. “Great words”.

Everyday the window watches her shrink and her hands shake. She witnesses the sun rise from the East and hide by the desert thread. Yet still, all the words she had preached about the sun she never laid down on paper. She vanished her pandemonium and condemned it to self-exile. The great words she is to write are expected and expected of them to be great.

“I have become as dry as the desert devouring me” She says. “If I am as dry as thy, it cannot thirst me”. She whispered before spreading her fingers like broken bird wings and turning the door handle.

The moon welcoming her stance, she walked through ages of dust. She walks in hysteria, her delirium rushing to see the stars. Her oppressed mind overflowing her cup to finally let her hands fly. A flower she sees in the distance. “I have come to you. Will you soak me from the heavy waters that befall on me?” She asks the desert as she keeps her chaos marching.

As she senses no clouds above her, she stops and feels herself downpour. At this time, the desolated desert holds her hand and gives her the last fresh opium from the land. And as this one opens up, little seeds drop in her palm. She holds them warmly and in a rush to not let them slip by, she swallows them as they are, dark and tumultuous.

For the first time, she feels her veins desiccate and her pulse take a breath of dry air. She no longer drowns in her desert. For the last time, she plans her step as she walks through the cracked lanes. “I must go search for my water”, she said before disappearing in the distance of the desert.