We will wake up in the spring, in the daffodils, the the frost, with the dark months melting around us to reveal things that have died and things that have grown in their place. But at first the sun will be too bright and our eyes will roll in their sockets to shield us from the rays. And when we adjust to the light we will see that we are at the bottom of a hill, and we will climb, we will climb and climb until we are delirious and our legs can no longer carry us and things will become greener, and plants will seem to explode with life, sap from the leaves, nectar from the flowers, dripping like molasses.
We will reach the top eventually, we will reach the top and realize that instead of a plain or a place to rest our head, we are standing on the edge. An edge behind us and an edge in front, balancing on a precipice. And we sway and we sway, dizzy from the height and the heat and the air that is so much thinner but so much sweeter and how we need it like a drug. We will raise our arms and feel the clouds like cotton candy wrestling against our arms, and birds will tangle in our hair and we hold on just a second longer, because we know the name of this place is Summer, and we want to keep it for as long as we can.
But the longer we stand, the more tired we get and suddenly the hill in front seems more inviting, like the times we remember from childhood when we would run down the steepest hills so fast our knees would nearly touch the ground and then our legs would buckle, we would fall and roll though the grass over and over and over until we landed at the bottom. And now we land in leaves, leaves of rust of russet and mustard and skeletons of leaves that once were. And we catch our breath, laying in the autumn debris at the bottom of the hill, at the edge of a forest.
And when our breath is caught and locked once again inside our lungs we know that all we want to do is sleep. Sleep and dream of nothing. So we roll onto our hands and knees because we are tired and the shadows are long, and we crawl, we crawl into the forest, the further we get the darker things become, and all natural colours disappear. The world around us becomes a blueprint and the trees become ghosts of themselves. And when the snowflakes start to tickle our noses like feathers, we will find a place to curl up and close our eyes again, hibernating for what feels like years.
DEERLINGS AND GHOSTTHINGS
