remember flowers?

For so long everything had been dying.

The world and my heart and my body. Cruelly chiseled into less. Into ugly and pain and loss. The memory of a stifled spark, extinguished by struggle.

For so long everything got colder.

A chill like the skeleton hand of earth herself reached up from a frozen tomb to grasp my ankle. A brittle icy tether to death, creeping from beneath my feet, to settle in between my ribs, revealed in the visible whisper of an exhale.

For so long everything got darker.

Not just for more hours in the day, but in depth. Night as far as the eye can see, swallowing every object and idea up in wolfish gulps. Stars that once twinkled with promise dulled to a glowing discontent, timid and uncertain, behind a curtain of fog.

When did the light and color and sparkle start to feel like a lie we were told?

Roots and growth and blooming, a deceptive fairytale, a broken covenant.

Hope wilted, not just through a season, but over days that were lifetimes. The way that a dream spanning a sliver of one sleep can hold an infinite nightmare, larger than linear time.

I lived as a thorny black stem, bore witness to the excruciating death of each individual petal. Brittle teardrops, once velvet limbs, ripe with plans and enthusiasm and love and certainty. In stillness I watched each pillar of who I believed myself to be crumble. As desperate to stop time as I was powerless against it, I memorized the choreography of decay. Held my breath in anticipation of every inevitable crescendo and finale. The gentle plummet, soft crash, and silent clatter toward reluctant conclusions. Paralyzed, unable to steel myself against the oncoming blows of regret and grief, waves relentlessly beat against a cliff side.

Slow agonizing hours dissected the good things into dust and vapor, equal parts piercing and elusive. Swirling gracelessly in a whirlpool of black, bled of all passion and expectation, defeat peering through my eyes, I remembered.

A sunbeam favoring a patch of dirt. Hungry soil grabbing greedy handfuls of warmth, rewarding the surface with sudden bursts of green, saturated in life and newness and another beginning.

Beaming with an impending eruption of color and sensation and insatiable thirst for the life bubbling from a dusty well I never thought I’d drink from again.

All at once a dawn will arrive and embrace you with the undeniable reality of god’s dripping brush painting this hollowed empty canvas with texture and depth and infinite possibility.

Life thaws, hope flows, inconceivable beauty springs from the final notes of death’s haunting song, and I am reignited.