Yes, it's one of those again. Remember, a steady diet of vagueness brings heartburn...

The View From Below

When they're parking cars on your chest

you've still got a view of the summer sky

- Know Your Onion (The Shins)

Individually they are weights of no measurable significance; every little sin, each miniature lie and those recollections that only bloom in the soil of silence. The pulse of a day, when lived beyond limits, produces sufficient exhaustion to arrive at sleep. Nightly she walks grudgingly over the border from trusted wakefulness into slumber but the steps are treacherous inches. Armies of memories defend the peace from her invasion and she awakens with lead burdening her bones.

One can accept the taste of bullets but never the tang of breakdown.

A long life has been crammed into the short vessel of years and all the certainty she has earned is that sanctuaries are not made of vices.

Time is a pretty face who holds open a door with regal courtesy and then demands payment. But the clock and the calendar are not the only foes. Some enemies clothe themselves brightly, aching to be noticed and some wear discreet armor, dancing politely as their smiling parries stab at her head. They feast on the dark, dine on the fears. Discovery, carved like a roast at the center of the table.

She craves the end of shadows... until they leave.

Daylight should be warming, its light a cleansing of all that the night has multiplied. Yet while vulnerability breeds in the black, exposure bleeds in the bright. Any neutral eye must surely recognize the insolvent soul encased in the simple body. Physically capable of outracing the schedule, her mind turns fiend when confounded by too much unfilled space. The chatter cannot stave off the fretting, doubt a lonely path she's made many efforts to abandon.

And does when he walks beside her.

Angelic eyes war with the devil's grin as he says they are made in the same fire. That is how he found her on this road, how they can move together so comfortably, And his words are fine sugar on her tongue. But she chokes down the flavor as only the undeserving can.

Darting to the edges, she doesn't get far.

On these days, he slows his own pace to match hers, a hand at her elbow to steer her from melancholy and into the beaming world of bright and glow. It is a portable sun, his smile and instead of learning immunity, she practices standing beneath the smolder. It takes several years and more lies to realize the direction that her life faces; spine pressed to the ground by the collective weight of wrongs.

Which is the optimal view.

Because from below she can observe what lives above, this thing hopeful and generous and waiting. He's always waiting, yet never idle. It forces radiance into her eyes, a mere blink from clarity and the warmth that sears away the ugliness. False hope, perhaps, but more than the night can offer. Though her fingers cannot hold him, not yet, they can drag through his light as a decaying branch weaving unsteadily into the life-giving sky.

It means she must reach up, beyond herself and the cold that will remind her that she is the dead rock of the moon and nothing more. Only glowing from a distance with borrowed light. But his view of what is refuses to differ and it's convincing enough that when he grips her, pulls her into the atmosphere, she does not resist.

She wants to tell him of her theories.

Her night to his day, her winter to his summer. It is only later, when they have been one in an autumn moment in the approaching dawn, that she compares her moon to his sun.

At least, he concludes, they share the same sky.