the blacksmith

The sun can warm your heart and share his loyal light for the winding road ahead. But he is unforgiving. He will unapologetically burn years off your young skin, steal time from your body’s ticking clock, and scorch our precious earth, evaporating her life-giving powers.

We’ve never lived in a world without a sun. Our universal constant across time, unifying the ages, the mystics, the sceptics and the free.

We’ve never lived in a world without love, how could we evolve without this bonding and driving force? What we wouldn’t do for love - live, die, give, try - loves lost but never forgotten.

Just as the sun will rise, our love will rise again. You’ll know when it’s time. The soft warm glow on the horizon, our beacon of hope, beckoning, an unknown that’s surely better than the known. The unknown is the ammunition to my agency.

~

The feeling resonates long after impact, dust settling on my delicately ruined façade. I tried, oh Lord I tried, to hold myself accountable to you. But my soul, it knew, I was not the tree you needed me to be. Roots dried and tangled, like the nest of my hair after fucking, your hands and your heart too tight to let go. Knowing I could spare you, I had to let you go.

We sigh in unison, acutely aware that the heat was mere melting of iron to mould this mess into meaning. We burn to feel alive. The chance to become lost in a moment is never a moment wasted, to throw oneself in the cauldron and learn by presence and fire.

Steam rises and yet we go deeper, knowing the blacksmith’s work is not yet complete. Although we never really know if it was complete, if it’s at all possible to even be complete, all we know is how much we can take before we drown.

~

I emerge from the depths with my senses intact but unreliable. Readjusting to the scale of time, finding the rhythm of the ordinary and the mundane. Glimmering memories relentlessly pierce my dreams.

Wake, sleep, wake.

And yet, sleep is where I feel most at home, among the absurd and all-encompassing where time has a mind of its own, finding and writhing its way through long nights without the sun.