Thought on a midnight day

I feel so ill inside. It doesn’t matter what I tell myself, nothing makes it better. The sun is bright outside, but I am still cold.
When I was little, I had those hamsters. I had made the promise that I would die the day they died. They died, one after the other, and I didn’t. There was the cat, and so I promised him I would die with him. He died, and I didn’t.

Equinox. When the days become as long as the nights. When pain and hope merge into one. When tears become smiles, and fear becomes happiness. When all is blurred, and nothing prevails.

One day after another, they pass,
Hand in hand, they glide
Through time, through times,
Joy, sorrow and pride.

One night after another, they pass,
Side by side, they fly
The coat of darkness falls,
Laugh, cry and sigh.

One day, one night must follow,
Shuffling the feet of time
To creep into the light,
And set the pattern free

I long for the vast, overwhelming green or sunburnt fields that would stretch before me to infinity. I want to forget how scared I am of bugs and crawlies, and I want to escape in the midst of nature. Hunting antilopes, riding zebras, hiding from lions and other big cats... Building my own little house made of wood, digging my well and letting the grass overgrow so much that I would feel as though I am drowning in them... Knowing all the plants I can eat, those that can heal me, those who could kill me... Escaping the hungry fury of leopards, watching the eagles soar in the empty blue skies, letting the sun turn my skin a golden parched labyrinth. Dying, my face against the warm, cracked soil so I can give a little back of what I took from it.
But that could never be my life. I am a city girl through and through. I wouldn’t know how to survive one day in the wild, I would scream in terror at the sight of the slightest spider. Just sitting in that poxy garden here in London, makes my skin crawl. The ants, the bees, the spiders, they all make me jump in terror. Still, I have dreams, hazy dreams, of what freedom ought to feel like, maybe.

How strange to think that freedom appears more concrete when imagining a patch of wilderness, as opposed to man-made society. The rules, the laws, the expectations allow us to experience a certain degree of individual freedom, but it isn’t freedom. It is a compromise to allow billions of others to experience a glimpse of what it ought to feel like.

Nature is so much worse, in the sense that it eclipses all notions of individuality. Nature is blind and rests on an intricate chain of events, all so closely linked together that it only suffices to disturb one element to wreck everything else.

Nature is far from random, though. It might have been the case, at some point in the beginning of life itself, where it acted randomly. As soon as the foundations were placed a chain of events took over, thus trapping nature itself and limiting its freedom. In other words, once something happened, there could not be random factors in play, only a chain of events departing from an original factor. That chain of events is most probably predictable, and our knowledge of all the predictable events is limited by our current ignorance only.

At least nature is blind! It doesn’t have a conscience which could be blamed for anything. Much like an intricate, invisible machine, it is everywhere at once, and it carries on working despite all the changing factors or events that might come its way, adapting and morphing to survive as a whole.

Once you begin to look around -the trees, the animals, the flowers, the sun and skies- you are mesmerised by the sheer beauty of it all, and the life that transpires from all elements, no matter how silent the source of life might seem. That beauty is so powerful and mighty that it hurts.

It was, after all, beauty that killed the beast.

One danse is all it takes,
Leaves, blood and fire,
Twirling, the scortching ire
Wound round the stakes.

Storms in the sea,
wreck the ship and flee
Across the flooded plain
And rise above the pain

Of living, through the day
And the night prevails,
A whisper in the bay
To kill the mocking bells

Of churches grand and glorious
Set in a mist of mighty shadows,
Along a row of weeping willows,
Moaning, crying, furious.