Through Sickness and Through Health

You’re getting sick again.

You’ve stopped counting after fifty. No matter what you try, you can’t grow numb to it. The skies grow murkier and muddier and muzzle you with rain. As much as it falls, you feel horribly dry. Your children, the furthest and brightest parts of you, are all decaying and crumbling. Falling from your arms one by one, each severance as final and excruciating as the last. Some fall onto ground and lay there stuck, brown as the dirt and cracked. Others fall and are swept away by gusts, or stomped on by cruel, thoughtless beasts. Those same beasts end up swiping them away in dead piles, out of your sight, so that they might enjoy more convenient strolls. You suppose they’re doing you a favour. If you had to stare at the accumulation of corpses you raised, you’d beg the beasts to tear you down as they have your brothers.

The skies have gotten even darker now. You are naked, colourless, shaking in the cold breeze. All that dons you, besides your barren skin, are the occasional coatings of frozen droplets that fall from above. It is whenever this moment comes, that you wish you could walk. You feel a tinge of embarrassment return, the same way it always returns. Embarrassment for letting your grief blind you once more to beauty. For when the frozen droplets paint the world white, you are enchanted. Spellbound. Even the beasts, you’d forgotten, hide beauty. When this cold reaches its zenith, their homes alight in gold and red and the richest of songs spring from their lips.

When the blue of the sky returns, you could weep. If only your arms could move of your own accord, if only you could stretch them in worship of the glorious light. Colour returns to the world and so too do little, dear relatives of yours. Sprouting from the ground to say hello, to feed buzzing, busy friends, to bring about the great resurrection, each one more beautiful than the last. Children begin growing inside you again, and their coming deaths cannot wound you, not now, not when they begin to take form, clothing your tarnished body in their brightness and love.

When the skies blaze with blue and the sun soaks you in warmth, euphoria rains. Your children are innumerable, your sickness a memory so faint, you’ve forgotten what it felt like. The winds fall as still and quiet as you are, as still and quiet as you shall always be. And this time, you’re sure, you have never bloomed so wholly.