Tiny Fictional Nugget
Can't sleep. Words bouncing around in my head, like those twenty-five cent rubber balls you can purchase from the vending machine at the grocery store.
In April
Once, in April, she died. Not a literal death, where the heart stops and the breath pauses; that would have been a far sight easier. Rather, the world ended, and her heart did not stop, but rather, it shattered. She was always a woman who tried to keep the lid on the boiling pot that held all that she felt, and often did this to great success; but when it bubbled over, she felt with such intensity that she thought it might burn her alive. Sometimes it did. It certainly left a mark.
April would come and go every year, regardless of her place in the world. In the city, the trees returned to color and bloom. Tight buds guarded their secret until one or two mornings when, with beautiful synchronicity, the city erupted into color. Pink and white, yellow and red, green and greener. Even then, when she felt like those trees, springing back to the best of all possible forms, the mark once left behind made itself known and Maia felt an understandable melancholy to which she was unable to lend words.
Still, it was hard to find the strength, or lack thereof, to allow herself to express these things openly. Perhaps the only other living breathing human in the world who would ever begin to understand the way she felt was right there, and she could not quite bridge that gap. The spring was a time too fresh, too raw. The heat of the coming summer, the sweat, the weight of the air and the lightness of the wind-this was a time when she would be in season, maybe when all secrets and shadows could spill from her.
In April
Once, in April, she died. Not a literal death, where the heart stops and the breath pauses; that would have been a far sight easier. Rather, the world ended, and her heart did not stop, but rather, it shattered. She was always a woman who tried to keep the lid on the boiling pot that held all that she felt, and often did this to great success; but when it bubbled over, she felt with such intensity that she thought it might burn her alive. Sometimes it did. It certainly left a mark.
April would come and go every year, regardless of her place in the world. In the city, the trees returned to color and bloom. Tight buds guarded their secret until one or two mornings when, with beautiful synchronicity, the city erupted into color. Pink and white, yellow and red, green and greener. Even then, when she felt like those trees, springing back to the best of all possible forms, the mark once left behind made itself known and Maia felt an understandable melancholy to which she was unable to lend words.
Still, it was hard to find the strength, or lack thereof, to allow herself to express these things openly. Perhaps the only other living breathing human in the world who would ever begin to understand the way she felt was right there, and she could not quite bridge that gap. The spring was a time too fresh, too raw. The heat of the coming summer, the sweat, the weight of the air and the lightness of the wind-this was a time when she would be in season, maybe when all secrets and shadows could spill from her.