broken highway

we can keep talking if i talk with my mouth closed, heart open, heart closed, endless cycle.
whether my mistakes lead to the holes in your chest is one thing but magic was never my strong point, anyway. and you didn’t mind, so long as you could give the people what they came for.

it finally dawns on us all that it was never about surviving the war, or being happy about it. it was about something that i can no longer remember. but the swords are still there in the armoury if i go and look, silver and relentless and unbroken. the guild still moves on with new faces and new memories but we stay right here on the edge of the forest, waiting for the start of another fight for something that matters.

when i go back and i look at all of us now it’s not in faded technicolour, we’re still bright as day, but some of the faces have been carved out with a knife that an old woman helped wield long ago. maybe the story means nothing. it was the ghost of what happened that drew the nine of us together and pulled the rope around us so tightly that it broke.

what do i tell the five that were left? where is the one that never stayed? he left as soon as the rest of the ashes from the others had settled onto the side of the beaten down road. sandy and undisturbed. all our footprints still there. all our shadows still waiting.

maybe we can’t keep talking like this. maybe there were no mistakes, and no scars left to tell the story. it’s not beautiful enough to make a song out of, or tragic enough to hurt. sometimes it’s funny, how hard we all wished for the world to turn our way and keep moving as we ran. in a way, it did.

i hope you can see it, from your own quiet side of the universe. i hope you can see me waving from the corner of my room.

[Image: somewhere at the university. Source: Dani Relbyn. Used with permission.]