Dating : Circles

You. If you must save your mother, you better do it. Go, go, and do not come back after you have the antidote firmly in your hands, your last breath of energy has been sapped, and the stars have lost their shine in response to your movements. You are her only hope. Run.

Say goodbye like only a daughter can. Let her stroke your hair so she will not forget what it feels like to love you so deeply and enter into the deep, dark woods. You have never been so far from this valley you know like the eyes of your sickened mother begging for help. Beyond, you do not know what lies beyond, but a darkened place where screams are heard.

The nights pass slowly fading as fires rage around, as the trees become taller by the strength of the wind, and your legs becomes weaker from going so up in the heavens and so deep into the abyss. Your mind sets on the medicine perhaps leaves of a mystical flower, perhaps herbs chewed by a unicorn, maybe a pill forged in the musk of celestial fungi. You climb through the grassy lands and the rocks, you lie in the lakes and sleep in the shade, you burn fingers, one after the other, fighting the wildfire, since there is no time to waste. You must save her. You must go into the unknown and save the person you love the most, ferociously, devotedly, with strength mustered from ages of warmth, and be heroic.

You. You must save your mother even as your feet bleed, as your nose breaks, as your teeth fall apart because they are tired of biting into wood and bone. You cannot waste time getting lost, running up that hill, making deals with the clouds, crying as you go in deeper and deeper. Your house seems lost in the vastness and the end does not seem near. You must stay strong, you must save her, save yourself, save your future.

Go, cry into the night, walk over the day, destroy the darkness, lie to the lightness. The mountains seem to multiply, the lands move forever, the lakes and the rivers and the streams flow, flow beyond what should be possible, and you are getting thinner, you are changing your shape. There is no hope for you, there is no hand to caress your hair, no kisses and beautiful mornings as a family, no warm afternoons to cuddle and read stories by, no blood to shed. You must go on if only for your mother’s sake. She pleads for life in murmurs.

Run, run as fast as your last sigh can turn, as your last touch will let you slip into mud, as your last feeling of rain is the one cleaning your wounds, as your last of life is your home, silenced by death, and a sudden realization that never hits you because you cannot think anything else.

You could have saved your mother. You could have.