I wake from a dream, standing alone in a barren wasteland. Spindly twigs protrude crudely from the grey earth, attempting desperately to be trees. I squint my eyes as I attempt to decipher where the ground ends and the sky begins, but my lack of focus blurs the scene as I can only focus on feeling what the Earth feels as the life is slowly and torturously sapped from her broken body. The weight of oblivion falls upon my mind like night, and I can feel the fingers of insanity tugging on its fraying edges.
Everything inside of me is screaming, pleading for me to run as fast and as far I can. But no matter how much desire I possess to rip myself from where I stand, my muscles refuse to cooperate.
Just as I see the last flames of hope dwindling into the pit of despair within me, I wiggle my toes in unexpected success. Something dry and rough crumbles against my feet at the movement, but still I can't break free. With my feet being the only part of myself that I can feel, they thrash around in a series of helpless attempts to exhume themselves from the stale grave that they seem to be buried alive in.
As soon as I decide that my efforts are futile, a tingling sensation begins to creep up from my ankles, the feeling slowly settling back into my limbs. Under normal circumstances, this would come to me as a relief, but as the pins and needles wake up my body inch by inch, I make the sudden realization that my two legs have morphed into one. Panic ignites like a scorching flame within my chest as the tingling finally engulfs my shoulders, neck, and skull in finality. But although the awakening is complete, I still cannot take a step. My legs and feet are still bound somehow. Feeling the hot whips of terror, I drop my gaze down to examine myself. Ice cold cognizance washes over me as I take note of cracked and peeling bark.
I am exactly the same. Just another spiny, shriveling branch among the endless abyss of carbon copies.
My roots are embedded deep into the crusty soil, but stretch just shy of connection with any other of my fellow prisoners. The closer I study my wooden companions, the more I am able to make out faint etches of faces engraved into the splintering wood. Their features are contorted into expressions of agony, but it is the lips that disturb me most. Carved amongst the wrinkles of anguish, their lips are twisted up ominously into a permanent smile. What unsettles me most is that I know I wear the same expression on the surface of my own withered and rotting tomb.
The fingers of insanity begin to wrench at my mind with more vigor as uncertainty seeps in through my very roots. The vast and spacious nothingness couldn't feel more claustrophobic if it were alternatively a tiny box. I can almost hear myself cracking under the pressure and my mind tells me that there is nowhere to go but down. Forever down, until I am consumed by the emptiness.
On the brink of complete and utter hopelessness, I hear a sound in the distance. It is faint, and barely audible, but I can make out the beautiful sequence of notes. It is music, floating towards me in a string of color through the colorless expanse. I blink rapidly, begging my eyes to stop betraying me, for I do not know how much more my mind can take. But to my surprise, the color does not fade out of my vision. Instead, it rises and swells into the most vibrant storm of colors that I have ever seen, wrapping itself around me until I am completely cloaked in its beauty. I sigh and close my eyes, surrendering my entire self to the music.
When I open my eyes, nothing has changed. But the world looks a little less grey, and I feel a little less powerless. A crystallized cocoon now hangs from the branch that is my right arm. It glows rich with color and energy, and the more I focus on its almost magical properties, the bolder and brighter the little orb becomes. The intensity grows and spreads through my body until it bursts in an explosion of blinding light, both within me and without.
I am now looking down at the carcass of who I was, but it is growing smaller and smaller in the distance as I flutter away. The music transformed me. No longer am I hostage to the decomposing shell of my former self, but I am the embodiment of that last seed of potential that somehow survived inside of me. I am the one who has sprouted her own wings to fly.
The higher I soar, the more my awareness of the world sharpens. The more I can see, the more I can feel, the more I can understand. The freedom I feel as the wind beats against my little wings is unsurpassed to any other feeling that I have ever experienced. My heart pumps pure art into my bloodstream, and I bathe in the reality that I can plant myself absolutely anywhere.
The weight of my life lies heavy back in my own hands, but it is the kind of weight that I will gladly take to my grave a million times over.
Because now I can go anywhere and be anything. And as I watch spring rise like the sun behind the timeless majesty of the mountains, it is only beauty that I seek now.
YOU ARE READING
A Collection of Records
Short Story"I've been injected with Music by the needle of a record player." ~Me To know my music is to know my soul. A simple collection of music and thoughts.
