The Traveller
Of course, she was going again. Why wouldn’t she? The promise of rainbow smiles and midnight laughter had always led her dreams. As the clocks rose, she packed meagre things, light on productivity but heavy in wit and wisdom, leaving the way she had come, with whispered promises.
Was it ridiculous to care? The air creaked and groaned and settled to minding its own business, ignoring the salty taste of broken hearts.
Moving in all directions, the journey wasn’t easy; the dust of a thousand memories kept gritting her eyes and parching her throat but it would be impossible to navigate without them. She stepped outside her mind and watched the light show with mild curiosity. The primary absorption was the light of stars and cities twinkling far below, enticing and yet to be known. Unexplored landscapes indulgent with the temptation of warm spices and wet kisses. She longed for the experience of everything everywhere, a multi-faceted awareness of omniscient richness.
As earth turned its other face to the sun, she moved as the wind across grassy plains, their soft flexibility yielding arcane nocturnal secrets of scorpions and snakes. As water, she welled into hidden oases, and in fire she burned recklessly through forests and in the hearths of loved ones from other lives, crackling flame whispering “I love you still and always will; only love remains.”
By dawn, the spirit of aloneness touched her gently on the shoulder, and with a sigh, she realised she had reached the last stop. Beyond it, the terrain was forever unknowable and promised the ultimate adventure.
Raising her arms to the sky she gathered handfuls of foam and feathers from seabirds, as delicate as Angels’, fragrant with the scent of redemption.
As she walked into the sea never to emerge, the jade green waves rose and subsided like a beating heart, closing over her head like Botticelli’s clam shell marking the death of Venus.
