“A term invented by author Gregory Venvonis to describe the devotion to positive spiritual growth amid underlying darkness.”
Though the glimmer might be eradicated (from time to time), it is always capable of shining again. Though it can be hard to see when cloaked in midnight, your mind is capable of fabricating untruths like a ruthless politician or an adversary.
(It’s why we tried to give the enemy a name – to make him easier to talk about then just an abstract concept.)
But the boulder that buries itself on top of you, smothering your breathing and swallowing your light, is also capable of eroding.
It might feel like centuries have passed you by, but just know – after every winter, we see flowers blossom.
You, too, will blossom again. I will resurrect from this darkness and discover my light from within. (Even if I have to excavate my soul like some damned archeological dig.)
It’s too easy to surrender, but we’ll fight through the frost, push past the sparrows’ wings that beat furiously against our bones, and surmount our devils.
(The ones we have named and even the anonymous ones who prefer to cower in the darkest places inside us.)
“A feeling best described as sorrow that has no clear cause.”
We thought by giving him a name, it couldn’t break me so badly, but the agony still extinguishes the illumination within my irises, within my pupils, within my soul. There is a darkness deeper than I care to admit, but I cannot hide from forever. (My fire has not ignited in days, yet I cannot hide in bed and relinquish myself to the shadows completely.)
I swore to myself I would not drown in thoughts such as these, but sometimes, the devastations are greater than I can control.
It sometimes feels as though I am caught in a riptide, the ocean current pulling me away from everyone who loves me until all they are is a speck of sand, a memory.
(My honesty is raw, my words are plain. I usually hide behind an ornate metaphor crafted carefully and I tread with caution – not to overstep the boundary lines.)
I have picked up the pen several times, but the ink well is dry and my thoughts crystallize like honey thickening as it cools. Nothing makes sense when the demons take the reins & I try to swallow the bile down.
I try to offer a courageous smile, but I feel weak and collapsing is the only option I have sometimes.
Don’t judge me for the anguish I carry. Each one is a sparrow beating its wings inside my chest, desperate to be released but finding a home buried deep in my rib cage alongside that dimly burning crystal that is a barely beating heart.
(I cannot swallow for all the feathers that have climbed from my chest to my throat, from my throat to the wet insides of my mouth.)
So, instead, with this inexplicable sadness, I lie here, my heart – my sparrows – knocking against my chest (an unspoken tragedy bearing down on me).
I drive. I drive in search of you. I drive to forget you. Most of my passengers don’t speak. Silence is both a miracle and a plague. Both holy and evil.
I don’t speak either.
It is what it is.
One morning, I had a passenger who had eyes like you. They were brown swirled with cinnamon. I didn’t believe she was you, but I hoped.
I try. I try to forget you. My heart hurts. When I think about you, it aches. You once told me, “Sebastian, you’re too dramatic”. But now, you’re gone.
And the world is empty.
My sentences are short because I don’t know the language. I know grief is a language all its own – one I am fluent in. You spoke much better than me. I have pain I cannot find words for.
This country was your home. I live in this foreign land, hoping to find you everywhere I look. You are nowhere.
I am nobody in love with a ghost.
Photo via cottonbro studio
I think about your calling me dramatic and picture an actor on a stage. Life is a tragedy with no direction. Grief is a rock in my stomach that weighs more than love ever did. Love was buoyancy and lightness. Levity and joyousness. A balloon. Not a stone.
All of my clocks are stuck on the date I lost you, Annalise, February 10, 2020. It was a Monday.
Lunedí – that’s how you say Monday in my language. It sounds like sadness and eyelashes frozen with tears. But you can’t hear my voice. I wish I knew how to reset my clocks, so they, too, would remain frozen at 6:28, but they press onward.
And I know you would tell me to move on too, but I can’t.
Moving on means forgetting.
I refuse to forget you, Annalise.
You’re in every flower I pick, every passenger I drive to their mundane lives, every song lyric I hear, every tattoo I ink into my skin.
You are everywhere and nowhere all at once.
I guess this is what love means.
My heart belonging to a ghost for all eternity.
Photo via Zarina Khalilova
ANNALISE
Sebastian, Sebastian, I hear you cry my name in the middle of the night when everyone else sleeps. Your tongue lazy with exhaustion, thick with the fumbling of foreign vowels and consonants, the words you have struggled with for six-and-a-half years.
I know you don’t blame me for being gone, but I feel like a ghost, the way my memory haunts you. I watch you toss and turn at night, dear Sebastian. I see how you refuse to take our pictures off the walls. You haven’t yet made peace with my absence, but I am gone now and you have to let me go.
Photo via Marina Utrabo
You still sleep with my pillow and I have heard you say it still smells of my shampoo, but Sebastian, dear Sebastian, the years press on and you must let go.
You look so aimless since I’ve been gone, wandering around this city, your eyes wide as you take everything – and nothing – in all at once. I want to apologize to you over and over, but I’ve done nothing wrong.
I was walking late at night, I’ll admit that. It was dark out, yes, and my coat, too, was black, but Sebastian, I was in a crosswalk, I had the right of way.
I know you’re not from here, my love, but it was a red light, that didn’t mean for that driver to speed up, you’ve driven in the city before, you know that means to slow, to stop. She hurried, thinking she could beat the light; instead, it was my body she beat, merciless, as metal against flesh often is.
Sebastian, dear Sebastian, please just let me go.
end.
Isabelle Palerma
This short story is entirely my own content – no A.I. used to create this.
You dress hurriedly, button your shirt hurriedly, and you run.
You run without thinking. You run home. You run past your doorman. You run into your apartment. You run into your girlfriend’s embrace. You run into the smell of her shampoo. You run into her open arms.
And you cry.
The wings are gone.
But in their place, you feel a small pair of wings flapping on your neck. You slap the back of your neck as though bitten by a mosquito. Shiloh looks at you, surprised. You have no answers for her, but you loosen your hair from its ponytail to hide the feathers.
You discover quickly you’re molting. You’re losing feathers, and laughing lightly, Shiloh scoops up some black feathers that trail behind you wherever you go. “Did you sleep with a dark angel?” she teases.
You don’t reply. Maybe they’ll just fall out on their own. But still, you feel the wings beat against the back of your neck. You hope beyond hope she doesn’t notice them. The dark wings should blend in with your hair.
But still the question remains – why? Why have they appeared?
You wonder what is happening to you.
Micah said he had answers.
You have to find him again.
You need to know what’s going on.
But first, you must go to your mother.
As you rush to the hospital with Shiloh, she tells you more of the details. Normally, lyrical, Shiloh is short with her words. “They thought it anxiety,” she explains, “she couldn’t slow her heart. Your mom isn’t the anxious type. She still can’t get it to slow.”
“A heart attack?” you wonder.
“They don’t know.”
“You seem distracted,” Shiloh confronts you in a way that is unlike her, “is it the dark angel?”
“Something like that,” you admit.
***
A few hours later, as you are walking out of the hospital room and toward an intern, you feel a strange sprouting sensation at your ankle. You yank up your pant leg and see a handful of ivory feathers clustered into a thick wing fluttering in the cool, sterile breeze. Luckily, Shiloh is glancing at her phone, and the only other person around is a beautiful intern pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair.
She smiles at you, her grin radiant, and blushing, you pull your pant leg down. Hopefully, she didn’t see anything. But the damage is done – you feel the swift quivering of the wings on your skin.
At first, you think it’s something fleeting and embarrassing – something akin to an erection. But when Shiloh and you make love that evening, you notice the wings fade. They don’t return that evening.
Or the next morning when you awaken to make her waffles for breakfast.
However, you do notice something odd, when you walk into the hospital to visit your mother, a new set of wings have grown on your eyelashes. Luckily, they’re black and curl up near the corners of your eyes, so they blend in with your eyelashes, but you feel their every movement.
And they appear only when you’re talking to your mother’s cardiologist.
She’s sweet, but unassuming. She wears a white lab coat and plain scrubs, and an engagement ring. But when she smiles, you think she seems nice. And you wonder what it’d be like to be her wife.
That’s when you know the wings aren’t a strange, sexual thing.
But when a new pair appears on your pinkie just like the first time, you grow curious. The same colors too – the lovely turquoise and brown.
Micah reappears as well.
You have so many questions for him, but he does not speak. He merely walks with you. He follows you to a coffeehouse. One you have walked to several times.
Photo via Vintage Lenses
But this time, when you see Jacqueline, the barista, your heart begins to palpitate, your hands grow sweaty, and your lips feel dry. You have so much you wish to say to her, but you have lost the nerve.
You stand outside the coffee shop, heart in your throat. That is before you see your reflection in the window. That is before you see the six foot tall pair of wings the color of milk attached to your shoulder blades, glimmering and shimmering like stars.
You gasp.
“It’s never been about lust,” Micah whispers, “your seraphic metamorphosis. It’s been about love.”
end.
Isabelle Palerma
This short story is entirely my own content – no A.I. used to create this.
I remember a photo I saw of a two-hundred-year-old cherry blossom tree. I imagine the events it must have borne witness to: births, deaths, tsunamis, the rise and fall of empires, but still its branches spread with pink and red blooms. I wake up some mornings, an elegy for self on my cracked lips, gazing upon my scars and wondering why I’m still here. But to some, I’m still blooming and they don’t see the fractures I think define me. Perhaps I still have some life in me.
If a tree can withstand two-hundred years of storm and sun, I, too, can live and love a little longer.
Isabelle Palerma 