Beautiful

Underneath a dark winter sky, gray clouds hang heavy, pregnant with coming snow. The smell of cold wet ice stings itself through thin air. A bird on a wire, high above the empty street. Alone with the silence which has persisted for centuries in the souls of all creatures, mighty and minuscule, living and deceased. Jet black, his small sharp-feathered silhouette cuts out against the dim white heavens. The land beneath is frozen and far away, stretching out in all directions like numb extremities, still reaching. Somewhere out across the desolate miles, she sits alone in a room, waiting for an event to happen, an event unplanned and unforeseen. For a new path to reveal itself in the palms of her hands, the pulse of her heart. A new pattern to unfold which will trace its fingers all over the pieces of her life and fit them together in ways she could not understand on her own. To appear before her, collected inside the body of another. An event to happen upon her life and transform it into something else. Something more grand and more meaningful. Perhaps it is the waiting which aches the most. Consumes her eyes, her hands, her skin, her thinking. The ribs rise and fall with her breathing. When it happens, she will be ready. She is always ready. Even against the sinking of the days, one into the next, into the next, into the next. Even as her own ghostly pale face appears reflected in the window. Frost curled by candlelight. Steady. Imagining. Everything is still. A life suspended within the continuum. Each crystallized emotion, held and withheld. The snow is not falling. The bird in the cage of her beautiful mind, is singing soft songs.