Picking Poison
It's not often someone gets stuck between to worlds where both are right and both are dangerous. In a dark tunnel lit only by a tumultuous and raging fire behind her, she stands brave and understanding. Shadows flicker about as the Wild of the fire comes closer and closer, the heat painful against her skin. She turns the other way and sees the end of tunnel, an abrupt drop off to an unknown depth and location. Frantic, she looked back and forth, unsure what to do.
Run. Run from the fire and pray it stops before it catches her. The turns and runs toward the cliff side. The further she gets from the fire the darker it becomes, and yet clearer her mind becomes. The races, looking for another escape, there is nothing, anywhere, nothing but uncertainty and question. Panic kicks in, unaccompanied by fear. She knows her choice and decisions are becoming clear, and yet she doesn't know quite what lies at the end of the road but an end, a far reaching end that could spell disaster for her, or a freedom she has no more.
The fire behind her grows, and is reaching it's choking arms out to her. She runs, and the world seems to slow down. Up ahead the cave ends, and a beautiful sunlight breaks into a wondrous threshold to uncertainty. This place, she knows, is where I cease and where I grow. She finds herself unable to stop looking back at the flame, and it is evergrowing, consuming her. Closer it becomes, and she wants to separate from the enclosure it creates. She wonders if she should face it and burn out, or follow the road to the cliffs edge and fade away.
It is only moments before the heat begins to become unbearable, and yet she doesn't succumb. On her own will she continues forward until she finally reaches out into the end of the cave. The ground stops abruptly and falls down a sheer cliff below, into a beautiful forest when the sun caters to its livelihood. She considers jumping to escape the fire that has plagued her fears and her mind. Temptation is strong, and she would rather fall to uncertainty, weightless against the wind, a free fall to an alternate end that would end as well. She was stuck between hardships, and something in her mind made her smile. This is the place she drove herself, these are the choices she made. She did not regret her road, and was fully prepared to be herself again, by herself, with herself. She decided to stand on the edge, teetering options and ends.
The fire had almost caught her, its exhausting smoke and flickering flame, roaring at her to consume everything she was...or thought she was. Behind her was a freedom, and yet it would as well spell uncertainty. She was alone again, the only one she ever learned to love. She brought herself here, and she was content on accepting her demise. She stared into a storm of a flame and her skin was burning, she couldn't breathe. It was suffocating and it wanted her gone, she knew. After all this time she knew there was nothing left for her here, was incapable of sadness, empathy and sympathy. Yet as she stared into the passion of such flame, it was cold somehow. She chose, seconds from burning in paradise, as she stood on the edge once again, then she fell back.
Sure, it bought her a few moments of happiness. She stared up at the sunlight, her body weightless for the first time in so long. Time didn't exist for this moment, and she was able to smile. She fell for an eternity, a peace of ecstasy and grand illusion overcoming her. The world around her was exactly what she wanted, endless and free of woe and captivity. This was the freedom that brought her here in the first place. This is the freedom that gives her a story, time and time again. She knows how it ends, only because it is inevitable. But time stops for no one, and as she has learned too often in life, it always catches up.
She falls through the trees, branches and leaf cutting her and whipping her burned skin, and though she understands the pain, she doesn't feel it. She is numb to the world, and content beyond imagination. Imagination; what a beautiful idea, but this was not that. This was pure reality, and she was the moment she slammed into the earth. Though this girl had choices all around her, she ended alone because that is what she knows best. She lay twisted and mangled, her body fitted forever into the soft ground under a canopy of perfect greens and growth. She went with a smile and a past full of open books and unraveled seams.
