doorways

Listen to me sing, and I’ll unfurl memories rooted in the clutches of time. Eroded, but still intact, waiting for my call to resurface from their slumber.

Witness my rhythm, and I’ll unearth the doorways opened and left behind me — seemingly millenniums ago, but still just barely traceable. If I backtrack through my path, hang over the edge where I leapt from the forest’s cliff, I can spot and show you the person I once triumphed but lost.

Freshman summer of high school, we ditched greasy cafeteria tables for lavender fields in France. The gloved perfumers, with delicate fingers meant for plucking, squeezing delicate flowers, ran and shook their fists at our skinny silhouettes.

We were leaping and prancing as the French sun marked our shoulders with cherry wings

We lollygagged through the lilac fields and blew kisses from the fragrant hills to ladies in bright dresses in the town streets below. The sky seemed within reach, so we waved our hands and hollered at hot air balloons that soared through the deep blue like our wildest dreams.

Take us up! Maybe we’ll never come down.

We thought us naive, so when so soon we were rebirthed fresh college graduates, money was our salvation. Bank desk bells and buzzes of traffic on Monday mornings —our new alarm

We filed through grey labyrinths of cubicles during the day, eyes unblinking, to touch grey tabletops illuminated by sunlight — filtered dull by skyscrapers’ tinted glass — then we roamed the city streets at night, loosening of starched collars and ties matching our heavy footsteps through neon doorways.

Blazers abandoned without care, reeking of booze and money on some taxi back seat or bar stool, shameful proof of our Dreamless days and Fantastical nights— was this enough? I thought so, so I stayed put. Staring at the dead end in front of us unbudging, the walls closed in, even though if we turned around, the labyrinth laid wholly behind us

As children, we frolicked and chased bees; each other; dreams Only to thrust ourselves into adulthood before we mean it The world was our oyster — then it became our prison.

Hear the night sing:

By your window at night, after endless days of monotony in doorless skyscrapers, unveil your blinds, and the night sky serenades you with its lonely song, a gentle melody on empty streets, Amber streetlights glowing on speckled tiles, so empty and still, as if the world is holding its breath as we peer out and there’s a sudden realization that the finite days slip away— only at night do you remember time flows so swiftly and there’s only now

Its lyrics— that time is a tide’s soft caress slowly chopping away sea rocks of memories and the past, and empty possibilities, wave from sandy shores behind you, and those countless doorways passed through and forgotten, regretted, tentalizing — long sunken, so release yourself and just float

As sleepless nights melt away to dawn-kissed mornings, our sweaty fingerprints on blank canvas and easel and fallen drawings, discarded but brimming with past love will have certainly dried into faint memories of an eighteen-year journey now far behind us.

The night shines its gentle light on us, so it’s yet too early to say goodbyes. This is my ode to our beginning.