imago
They will hurt you, brave soul.
When the fire begins to rise, as it surely will, gathering in the guts and climbing into the mind, they will notice. When the tempest you’ve carried inside submits finally to the sun, breaking your skin with the light of a different dimension, they will step back, peering through the cracks in their fingers and taking account. Your movement will be breathtaking. They will see in your dance the unmistakable play of nature that informs all of the beauty and all of the talent on this earth, and they will grow envious.
In you, they will bear witness to the freedom they’ve so longed for, the freedom they know they should feel, the freedom they taste in their mouths every morning before it is washed away in the contents of the day. They will search then for any and every fault. In their envy and their love and their terrible longing they will examine every inch of you, searching ruthlessly for what they would call a weakness — something to poke, something to press, something to ensure them that you are in fact not departed, that it’s a put-on, and that they haven’t lost one more tender soul in the ascension to the sun.
It will make no difference. For the movement you’ve embodied has grown out of the very relinquishment of their thoughts, their feelings, their projections on to you, and so their prodding will only push straight through into nothing. You will not be perturbed.
They will gather in groups then and talk, their dirty little minds mingling and rubbing their dirty little words together, grubbing up controversy, grubbing up gossip. From it they will create clamour, and raise scandal, and clamber out into the light holding all of it in their arms, marching your darkest secrets into the world and hollering for it to take notice.
And it will. But you will not. You move now with the language of the leaves, the fountain that feeds the stream, and to pay heed to those who would cut your branches and drain you of the dreams they perceive you to possess — the dreams they somehow feel you stole from them — makes no sense. You cannot be dismantled. They can take anything they like.
And take they will. When the world sees how unmoved you remain, they will know you are true, and those who have gathered against you will be consumed with rage. They will raise an army to tear you down. They will march to have your body blown apart, they will demand your head on a pike in the city square.
And have it they may. In their love and their jealousy and their dismay they will take everything from you, and then they will take some more. Yet when all of it is over, when the blood has finally stopped spilling, when they can see clearly the remains of you on their hands, they will know what they have done, and they will find in their hearts the sorrow of the stone that took you apart. In seeing how you gave so freely, how you surrendered to death so completely, they will know then, beyond any doubt - those who so hated you - that you were true, and they will raise you up, and declare you holy, and submit generations to the undying love of you.
You, who were only being you.
Image: Quality Stock Arts