An Opal Becomes

I jumped

And fell so hard that all of me shattered into irreparable pieces

Super nova

Discharging into the darkest oblivion

Fragments scattered to the winds in places where there was not even a breeze

Yet carried over cliffs and under vast oceans to be bitten at by birds and ingested by a kraken no one has ever seen

As grains of sand and whispering leaves, I joined with the ashes of angels that also had fallen

All those bits that spread far enough away to be unrecognizable as matter

For they no longer mattered

To anyone

Especially not me.

En route to nowhere

The scatterlings drifted to their own rhythm, not even knowing they had a heartbeat

But it was there

For she felt it before she saw the first glimmer

Once she noticed they shined, perhaps brighter than anything else she had ever seen, she could not ignore them.

So she paused and stared into each one, realizing their uniquely priceless value

Once whole

And gently lifted the hem of her dress to become a bassinet for collecting

It all.

Ceaselessly, she journeyed to places brighter than fire and dimmer than pitch

Because once she began she could not stop until she had everything

Knowing if even the smallest speck was not joined

Nothing would make sense

And while she combined these shards of what I

Once Was

and had

Now Become

I looked away

Nothing left but ephemeral eyeball orbs and floating gray matter

Wanting no part of this play she was writing

Let alone the

Lead Role

In something that no longer concerned me.

Numb it all

Kill it all

Let him inside me

Shut her out

Don’t scream

Don’t talk

Don’t whisper

Don’t even sigh

If you dare to look, to touch

It will burn you until

Everything hurts.

Let

It

All

Fall.

And then it makes no difference

To Anyone.

And I am gone.

But matter and energy never truly dissipate

No matter how much we want them to and,

Sometimes all it takes is understanding

And a change in perspective

To gleam through the mud of years of neglect and misuse.

Eons became nanoseconds until time stood still while she continued her task

Sometimes assisted by benevolent ones like herself

Caught in the purpose of that moment, like her

Sometimes battling armies of angry demons deriding her efforts to claim the untenable

All the while she just smiled slyly and turned the other cheek, calmly marching forward, forehead furrowed, crystalline eyes intent upon completion.

When, at long last, the parts were joined, it took on its own life

Now a thing entirely different from before

She guided her soft lips up to the mouth of this tiny creature

While she held it tenderly to her breast

And as she disappeared into its first inhalation,

Merging her with it,

the new thing shrieked and puked and coughed and then finally chuckled into laughter so hard

It Quaked

With the magnitude of a thousand suns joining in a death metal symphony

Until it froze solid

And fell

Again

Dropping so hard and fast that it all but disappeared as I fused with the Earth.

*

The crusty old miner bent slowly staring at the hill of dirt he had just plundered from the place where it had rested for millennia and with one sharp thrust of his pickaxe, split the rock open...

Revealing first fire, then snow, then blue glaciers glittering with grass-green flecks in

One

Solid

Stone

“Just like her eyes,” he thought, recalling the one he had not seen in half a century back to the slow-glowing embers of his mind.

There I was

No longer breathing

But fully rejoined

And dead yet

Repurposed and

Still

Alive.

But for only the sake of purity

Honest-to-God beauty.

This time.