* a soft entrance (open)

I am born in the wake of a setting sun spilled between tree blossoms, and wonder if, perhaps, the only colors in the world are burnt red and the tart pink of berries. What must those born after dark think of a sun-less orchard, the trees weighted in shadow, and life a silhouette or an impression against a star spattered sky? The surprise they must encounter at a sunrise, how a shadow can implode upon itself in the moment it takes for light to crack the earth into color. And for those born into the slippery, noon-time exhaust, what kind of fear connotes the moon? Who had even once anticipated that the sky was a looping reel of light and lack thereof? There is an anxious and sweltering speculation that is ingrown when tightly swallowed in an unborn blindness; a fear that an expectation cannot be met, that the world is too vast. It is unfortunate to have a mind only to be physically incapacitated and vacant-eyed.

The chrysalis has grown papery and translucent, tearing at its seams, flaking as though boiled. Cerasus fruit is startled in the wind, swept in circles, leaving indentations in the fine, orchard grass. My shoulders are angled, creasing the husk, and I can hear the world opening wide beneath me. The dilute noise is orchestral; the sound of pressed grass underfoot, the soft, plump note of fruit jostling after the breeze, and the slow, crisply satisfying chip of the pod sheathing. My coat chafes back as I sink out of the the chrysalis and onto the back lit twirl of roots. Joints buckle beneath me, but there is a lush, balmy push under paw that is pacifying.

The hills on the verge of the horizon line are dimpled and are symbolic of extent. With my eyes closed, the world is a chrysalis, but opened here is the company of a Utopia.