And so we dance

Smooth, refined. Hands that don’t exactly match the whole, you’ve contemplated them many times. Now you know why. They are hands you know.

What are hands if not extensions of the heart, worldly instruments for the otherworldly? Those hands have reached out to you thousands of times. 

As they brush past you this time around, you wonder at the music playing in the background.  Its tone is deep, saturated with something strong and ancient.  A song that was composed forever ago and that is textured and layered each time it plays for us. Another unclosed loop, we hear it and in response, our pulses, our blood reach out to it, caress it, leave traces. The moment of its creation and our listening forever on a vertical axis existing all at once and weaving us into the music itself. It does not end.

Thick and heavy, nostalgia and regret were the first couple to make it onto the dance floor this time. Why exactly have you invited them to this life?  Their haze is thick, we can barely see each other.

But there it is, as it has always been, home and belonging in the scent of smoke and earth that is you. 

Heart and lungs full, yes. But we know life is in the exhale, not the inhale.  Would you hold your breath if you thought it were your last?

XVI

Dressed in your Sunday best, you’re surprised to feel snowflakes landing on your bare skin, it’s not the season for this.  Friends have taken pictures of you and one of them didn’t frame it so well, or maybe framed it exceedingly well.  You’re standing inside a snow globe.  A whole life along with you.

And what a pretty snow globe it is, red base, decorated for the holidays, just waiting for someone to walk by and shake things up comment on how pretty it is.

You hear notes of a Peter Gabriel song on your breath and feel the weight of the tool in your hand.  You almost said weapon, but no, it’s just a tool. You feel more than see the globe shatter, hopefully no harm done to the contents, just the container.  

Seven rounds of this, cycling in, below the bottom of the ocean floor where everything that lives has no name.  Each time, a pulse that becomes the sound of hands clapping together, inciting, supporting, calling to action.  The tower falls again and again, by your own hand, and from the outside of your inside.

Given the fact that you chose tool and not weapon, we’ll call this one a breakdown to break through.