stopping

The burning down, the breaking of a tree.

Everything - EVERYTHING - is gone.

She grieves.

This song plays in the background:

It fades as she fades, whistles where words will not come.

Is she angry when she grieves?

Not really.

Like her tree, she has simply…stopped.

Stopped loving...stopped hoping.

She breathes, through pain. Weight. Weight of waves and broken branches.

Her life is a slow-motion noir movie presented in the barkchips and orange spray paint before her.

She sees forgotten loves, aching branches. Bike rides and sunsets across fields of poppies and dandelions.

She breathed here, once, and it was easier to.

She remembers her friend Nigel, the naughty Galah who would nibble her hair unless her mother pulled it back into braids.

She mourns. Mourns the burnt-up roots, the smell of charred honey and the bees still flying, lost now, because there’s no home to return to. No queen, anymore.

Her queen is gone, too.

She has been...uprooted and shredded.

And then the whistling stops, and the bees land.

And the noir movie is replaced with the bright parades of joy.

Her shallow puddle-like joy is replaced with quietness.

She misses the whistling as she mourns.

~