A Fleeting Thought

And Then She Healed

He had watched her unravel for four long years now. She told him it was part of her inexplicable changing process. How long it would take, but how beautiful she would feel once she was through it. She never knew how long the growing pains would last. She didn't care, she was fearless from herself. Her own body, and her mind. She would plunge deep into her darkness, just to understand someone from a more personal perspective. The only things she knew for certain that would come in her life was change. 

He watched her unravel through the change. Her face tear streaked, eyes red, body twisted on the floor. She made him promise he would stay until she was through, for she was most vulnerable in this time. He came to her because of this change. Though he didn't seem to see too much of it. She needed him for everything, to get water, to move themselves down the road, to bring her food. She needed him for everything, and couldn't wake in the morning without him. Now he was becoming tired like her. 

In this time, on the fourth year, she sat up from her bed in the morning, and climbed down, as if to be walking alone for the first time. She drove herself across town, and back, and just sat down writing. She paid him little mind when he got up. She had been inspired. She ignored him for three days, because inspiration is her first and only love.

She sat there staring at him one morning, and realized how she couldn't stay. As warm as his arms may be, the cold embrace of change, and travel, and inspiration, pulled stronger. She knew it in the beginning, but like good music, like the beautiful words of a poet, she would have to travel on.

People always warned each other from the traveling type. Mostly traveling man, they say he'll be gone for just a short time, but he's a longtime gone, and he'll be gone before you know it. Leonard Cohen wrote about the Stranger. And I realized I was just a stranger.