We were in line buying flowers. The selection was small and I was two days worth of travel away from my love. As I gave an old teacher a ten she gave me another ten as change. I told her that this can't be right and we corrected ourselves twice. The bills were too big, the prices too high, and the bulbous flowers looked cold.
You sat next her on that couch with the blossoms falling onto you. You said something about my sister, that unlike her i will place my ring on my pinky; you curled yours in example. I watched her lean over the couch, her hair fell over my arms and my eyes captivated by the way they caught light, soft and seemingly weightless like autumn mercury.
My jaw clenched and my fingers twitched. I wanted to run my fingers through her hair and kiss curious eyes closed. In the dark parts of her eyes I saw storms, regularly unpredictable. Filled with sand and uprootings of anything solid and standing. I watched myself pick up the pieces with her and told her to come with me. I wanted to climb the sides of mountains, and feel wind blow and fill me with joy, and fear and some semblance of life. I watched her imagine it and saying no, she'll pick up the same pieces uprooted over and over again if she has to. That this is life, too. I nodded.
I turned to you then and you followed me off the couch and we plopped on a creme colored bed together staring up and stretching our limbs towards the ceilings.
She sat on the other side watching me, the other room outside with its different season, different light. I asked you What would it be like to sleep in a bed and right on the ceiling van gogh had painted a piece? Any piece, I asked you. My eyes swam in the turbulence of the milky whites and yellows, of sunflowers, and falling petals.
The vision replaced and muddled by the hands of a dollhouse collecters lovingly tracing each ascending step and rail of a dusty victorian home. The hands opened a door and in it, a lonely dining room. A convalesced withering woman. Her wheelchair squeaked to another room, A resting room near a personal office perfect for the workaholic who has no strength to haul to bed, the collector mused.
I sat next to this woman and held her hand. We gazed into the corner of the room, a large, empty bird cage floating there. We heard the rustling of wings, and violent whispering of leaves in the wind. My eyes flickered from the bird cage and into the dazed eyes of the seated woman. I was not there. "We all see different things, we see what's in our hearts," the collecter explained. She closed the door to the room. I watched the woman's pupils dilate into pools of obsidian. I wondered where she was, what she saw.