Lantern Light

My hand waved good bye to them all as I set forth at sun’s first light. My heart was not waving, it was wavering, it was awash with the dark which I thought must surely fade with the night, but did not. My footfalls were heavy, so heavy. They were iron and blood and guilt. With every discernible knot of my being I lifted my legs onward, into the bright, away from their figures, still waving in their frozen recollection. I mounted a first hill and I was bleeding profusely, exsanguinated by the light and my distance and my grief. Was it me who was moving my body into the unknown? Was it me who was launching my flesh into the smoldering new day? …Thoughts which when answered would only increase my suffering. I felt an empty vessel now, mounting hill and delving vale. I felt that my contents were littering my path, still held captive by where I’ve been and who I knew. And what did the ‘where-I’m-going’ contain but emptiness? My eyes became frosted and glass, my brow precipitous. I trudged onward with a fool’s strength, the strength one borrows from the dead. The smallness of self overtook me; I was slipping forward now, moving disembodied yet swiftly into the fading light, but one. A torch glowed on the horizon and with strength unknown to neither flesh nor spirit I became the path back to that terrestrial star. I joined myself into its luminous tendrils and for one second had a faint memory that I was the very lantern light shone at my back when that morning I set forth. When, still and quiet, the waving them-figures held the sconce aloft.