Carved Boxes and Open Palms

I'm dealing with an absence of things to say, things to think, as though my life has stored its meaning in a carved wooden lockbox because the beauty of it seemed to rest on some complementary frequency but thoughtlessly misplaced the key, leaving the two of us, my life and me, to sit and stare at this work of art wordlessly, afraid to speak lest it be something inane and offensive.  We'd like to actively hope for a means to access the meaning it holds within itself, but more frequently the delicate woodwork and the stained iron of the lock leaves us in a state of hypnosis.  (Keys do not walk themselves to open palms, yet here we sit with our wrists askew, waiting for a weight to fall into our fingers).

We tell a story  – or I do anyway, as my life nods along – of someone who knows where and who to be, of someone who might have lost a key but broke the hinges or manipulated a paper clip because meaning was all too important to be left stagnant in cedar.  This someone is as oblivious to what the future holds as we are, as afraid, as happy to sit and wait for something to come to her, but she is also certain that there is more, some undiscovered fulfillment in the pursuit of dreams and the wild pull of ambition. She sweats when only breath is demanded and bleeds when they call for sweat.

In moments of disenchantment, she grabs onto shards of broken hope and turns them into prisms, which then turn her the temporary relief of her moments of optimism into a mesmerizing splendor – dreams of dancing with green and purple to watch them envelop her in yellow, blue and red instead.

The words of her flow out of me and into the air to settle in the intricate carvings of the box, which now balances atop a bench beneath the readied swing of hammer, the beauty ready to be traded for meaning though not without intent to find beauty in the aftermath.