Sehnsucht
I exist in the moments between potential and actual.
Were I voiced, I would change.
Were I heard, I would become untenable.
My home is diaphanous and suspended above the landscape. Within it I am liquid.
I met my reflection once; my own form, facing me across that permanent uncrossable space.
In meeting myself we granted ourselves permission to speak, and in speaking we broke our vessels and fell like rain on the lands below.
But of my counterpart I was assuming equivalence and the covenant of sacrifice kept.
Their home may have been in the forests of their own land, their form a mist already permeating.
In speaking, changed: this proven by the reflection ceasing to be; but as of a stone dropped in a pond, or as a face in a mirror suddenly broken?
And who spoke first, I or the other? Were it reversed, would I have fallen as sleet rather than rain? Or not at all?
I exist in the moments of creativity.
In the hours before dawn.
In the lonely hum of the not-quite-familiar crowd.
In the keepsakes.
In anything into which you pour care and attention.
Into everything for which you feel you exist.
I am like a pocket of air beneath an upturned boat held just below the surface by tiring hands which want, so achingly, to let go; but which in turn are kept steady by the will which acknowledges my existence.
Never to be spoken, for in speaking I would change.
In speaking I would become untenable.
In being heard...