Hi, it's Floorboards. This was my first post on the site. It came from a simpler time in my life. I'm still proud of it. I hope my life gets simpler again. Love you.
| The Locked Box |
|---|
| By: |
| Published on 12 Apr 2022 00:05 |
Before you are three grey boxes, bearing identical rusty locks. Atop them, written in red lettering, their titles: "safe," "euclid," and "keter."1 You can hear the gentle hum of a forgotten experience inside each one; the flow of nighttime traffic, the chirping of morning birds, the patter of footsteps on grass. You fish around in your pocket until you find what you need: three golden keys.
safe
The assortment obscures your vision
A cool breeze whips over the top most pillow
You are nesting, curled into a defensive ball
Wrapped under a cotton cocoon on a black summer night.
A fortress: a stack of decorative pillows
And weighted blankets
With an opening above you, like a hole in the sky
The light of passing trucks shines through your window, illuminating your face as it turns upwards at the world.
There’s a loneliness to the changing of the seasons
A promise that the world and all the people in it will keep spinning and spinning and spinning
A promise that all things will change, and sometimes things will stay the same.
You
have
never
felt
more
safe.
euclid
In the cotton candy morning, you stand in the glimmer of the backyard
(if it can be called a backyard, it's all asphalt)
and watch
through the wires and the hills that are houses
the yellowing, widening mouth in the clouds
into a blue, crystal throat.
You carefully slip off your shoes.
You walk down to where the asphalt ends, just beneath the high white wooden fence,
And you stand there, in the corner of the yard, in the one teeny tiny box that has grass.
Before you is a rusted iron gate, and beneath you are ladybugs and worms—and gnats that bite at you, but to swat them away would be purposeless.
You place your hand on the gate and think about the geography of the suburbs. Boxes within boxes within boxes,
You are in a box behind a box, boxed in from other boxes with greener boxes around them
It’s absurd, really…
You look back to the rolling hills that are houses and wish, for once
This world was non-Euclidean
And it would bend backwards in a way
So you could just
Perfectly
See the clouds part
And show you the sun.
keter
In the waning afternoon,
You are walking beside an intersection
The busiest road in the whole village, right in front of your partner’s house
And as you turn one last time,
There
In the green grass
A brown bird.
His feathers are sleek and shimmering
And his beady black eyes, like glasses, sit above his beak
He is on his side, and legs are broken
And so is his wing.
You scramble: Please don't be dead
Lifting your flannel from your shoulders, you produce
A fortress, with an opening above the avian like a hole in the sky.
Lifting him quickly, his shallow breaths match your own as you take off;
Good, good, he's breathing
And as quickly as his chest moves up and down, you realize
I should not be able to see him breathe
And a helplessness envelopes you as he speaks:
Chirrup,
chirrup,
chirrup
Then
silence.
You bury him there; a shrine of dirt and flowers, and your thoughts wander
There was nothing you could do for him
But it dawns on you at least you were there
And even in his final words to you, in some language
In some way
You knew what he said:
Thank you; I love you
And you know one day you will watch him float in an open sky
And for you, he will unfurl a banner of parchment, before facing away
And swimming through the air, with his powerful wings, into that final wherever.
As the darkness of another summer night closes around you
You proclaim this sparrow's name:
Keter, the crown
The golden brown beauty you held in your hands
That now you will always carry on your back
Always.
You gently set the lid back down. With a sharp twist, the third box is locked again. Satisfied, you turn to the door behind you, and press it open with your left hand. Light fills the nearly forgotten storage unit as you step off into somewhere else.