Feathers

I think the feathers are tickling my chest. The wings have been curled up inside me for so long, they get restless sometimes. In my mind-numbing boredom I close my eyes and I think I can feel it, the wind rushing at my face, forcing me to close my eyes, chilly mountain air filling my lungs that will burst into a confetti of sparkles inside me and out my ears and nose and eyes in the most glittery mess of person mush. I can feel my trembling legs standing up out of a car going at 160 so the icy gust hits my chest so hard  that my wings burst out my back. The stitches holding my back together slowly unravel, right between my shoulder blades going down, letting fall apart the bloody threads and the paper skin and gooey mushy muscle and sinew pulling apart so that the little feathers curled up inside can stretch out finally, bursting out with glitter and confetti, wings that shine with the light of the sun, competing with it to be the brightest. I am the ball of fire, the comet on earth, scorching the land as I pass like a phoenix burning up and waking up, free, to breathe and to fly, and new. I am waiting to let the wings loose so that I can fly for a while, stretch before those feeble hands of the clock run again and with that tick a feather falls off, falling on the asphalt with a clink of solid gold, a feather, sunlight on asphalt, a little of my gold on the tar. But my wings only stretch as far as my imagination, and they take off as fast as my fingers glide across a keyboard and as soon as I hit 'publish', they fall. again. until next time.

Chasing Metaphors

So in the Lion King story, there was a funny sort of miscommunication once which resulted in Timon leaving his Meerkat family, in search for Hakuna Matata. Timon's uncle told him that there is the one place a person must stay and when he relayed this to Timon's mother she wailed, cursing that her son had left home in search for a metaphor. That's what John Green readers could also relate to Looking For Alaska, which quite uncharacteristically happens to be one of my absolute favourite books. Strangely enough, Timon found it. He found Hakuna Matata. He found a home beyond what he could see. Literature, in that way is full of metaphors. We look for magic, and sparks, and vampires. Millennials are Timon. We look for things beyond what we can see, we create them, we discover them, we uncover them. We're chasing metaphors, because we aren't satisfied with plain old reality.