2:57 AM

nostalgia is 

remembering everything that never happened

and desperately aching for them.

(i wonder

if i am nostalgic

for you,

I saw a woman with a dress the color of sunshine and happiness. 

Her hair was fire and gold, the color of mountains in the fall when leaves turn a magnificent red. Her smile was the brightness of the full moon in a dark sky, bright and shining. Her laughter was the sound of symphonies and wind chimes, the music of birds in the early hours of the morning. She was Helen of Troy, the goddess Aphrodite, and she had a face that could end all wars or start a thousand battles. 

She looked around the café and I saw her eyes: they were sapphires, the color of the ocean at its most carefree and vibrant, jewels stolen from the crowns of kings. She was an animated watercolor painting, a ballerina and a gypsy, the queen of fairies and a perfect rose. 

The people around her were enchanted, and that Saturday morning in that café, I saw the woman with the touch of Midas, the woman who turned everything to gold with her presence alone.

You are seven years old when they come for you.

Your father prepares the carriage and your mother wraps you in thick furs from head to toe, carefully brushing your hair and coiling them in thick ropes around and around your head. The world is dead and dying, and the stars loom in the velvet skies, unnervingly bright as you steal glances out the carriage window.

Your mother reaches across you and pulls the curtains shut.

You arrive at a stately mansion carved of glistening pale stone, grand and somber in the dead of night like a weary sentinel waiting for something that never comes, merely skirting the edges of its consciousness. The house is beautiful, a work of art, but you look up at the intricate carvings on the ceilings as you pass the threshold and feel a keen sense of lonely agony seeping into your very essence.

The strangers in - gray, blue, white? the light is too dim to tell - usher you into an ornate ballroom of sorts, cleared of everything except for five other children. You meet one’s eyes, a cloudy green, and he looks down.

Your mother positions you next to a little girl with tight ebony curls and a crooked nose before withdrawing to the edges of the room with the rest of the adults. There is an implied warning to remain still, to stay where you are, so you pass the time counting the paintings on the ceilings and idly studying the mirrors on the walls.

They’re massive things, these mirrors, and their reflections expand the room to something infinite and horribly complex, spiraling outwards into eternity in a rigid pattern you can’t determine. In one of the mirrors you meet another boy’s eyes, this time small and blue, and in that one breath you exchange commiserating looks. Then one of the robed strangers shifts, and the connection is broken.

Eventually another girl is ushered into the room and placed next to you. She’s taller than all the other children, including yourself, but there’s something terribly young in the openness of her face, the roundness clinging to her cheeks, the hundred expressions that flicker over her face. She’s a pretty thing, inky-dark skin like silk and large eyes the color of the harvest moon, but her fingers are ragged and scabbed from what appears to be a nervous habit.

You want to comfort her, though you don’t know what’s happening either, but her arrival seems to herald a new chapter in this baffling story, as the strangers close the heavy wooden doors and move with renewed purpose.

None of the children move, but a palpable sense of unease rises like a choking fog as the strangers draw closer in tighter and tighter circles. They take you, remove your coat, and one of them places a long, cool hand over your eyes. Before your vision is overcome by sweet-smelling darkness, you see that six other robed individuals are doing the same to the other children.

Then there is no time to think, because there is a fire behind your eyes, a door opened where there should be none, pillars of wrath and sorrow and pure, unfettered joy spilling into the cracks and splitting you into halves over and over again, poison and antidote coursing through your blood like knives, claws raking down glass and wild, wild, m o v e m e n t - 

You come to yourself abruptly, gasping and trembling, pupils blown wide as you look at yourself in the mirror directly across the room. There are flecks of the universe yawning in your eyes, dustings of history and miracles scattered over your skin, and when your gaze slides to the side, it is greeted with six charred bodies with black pits where there were eyes, lips dried up and skin cracked like porcelain shattered and painstakingly glued together, only it doesn’t work, because what’s broken cannot be mended.

In a glorious ballroom of mirrors and weeping women splashed across the ceilings, you stand in the epicenter of a desert storm, six small corpses heralding your rise to divinity even as everyone kneels before you in reverence.

There is a gaping chasm in your mind, a divide, yours and not yours, you you you but not, and it’s like stepping into a sea of fire and coming home at the same time.

You approach a mirror, press your small hands against the pristine surface, and something not quite you gazes back.

i think

there is

a quiet power

in resting your head 

on someone’s shoulder

and knowing

that you 

are always