Thursday

By Zinta Aistars



"It was the music of hill and moon, a calling-down music, keening and wild. There was a stag's lowing in it, the murmur of sea against shore. There was moonlight in it and the slow grind of earth against stone. There was harping in it, and the sound of the wind as it sped across the gorse-backed hills."
- Charles de Lint, Into the Green


Suddenly, like a lost child, like a madwoman, like a burst and bruised and broken heart, I am all tears, streams and rivers and falls, and the evening outside my window is weeping, sky broken too, and rain falling on the lone robin swaying on the branch just outside my window, his head pulled down deep into his wet feathers, tiny life of chilled misery, bobbing with the movement of the branch as the rain pours down, swaying, submitting, finally giving in. Was it a mistake to put music on tonight? Every note finds its mark. As if every place I long ago thought healed has become raw again. Yet I lack the strength to put the music away, I can't. I can't. It sings of my self, it sings my history, it sings my loves and losses, it sings the doors that have opened and those that have shut for all time, it sings of wishes unheard and lost, it sings of nights once warm and now grown cold, it sings of yesterday, now mere memory, it sings the echo of abandonment, the stab of betrayal, the deep dark places of deception, it soars to the summits I wanted to climb but fell short, it sings of faces I have too long not seen, too long not touched, mouths not kissed, hard and sweet and long, those dear faces no longer held between my hands, eyes that won't meet mine, arms that no longer hold me, warm me, it sings of places I long to be and am not, it sings of words I dare not speak but that cry out inside, beating fists inside my walls, it sings of a life I wanted to live but could not, it sings the songs I thought I had forgotten, it sings of the moon that once held me in blue cool light, stars that shot through me, it sings of summer nights that came to an end, it sings of colors now faded and flowers now wilted to crumbling ash, it sings of nameless things, of sacred things, divine and achingly pure, of words I cannot find, my lips will not shape, it sings of courage I no longer have, and the strength that was once mine, it sings, it sings, and the tears belong to themselves, beyond will and beyond desire, it sings of unlit fires, it sings of rivers I could not swim, waves rising over me, of untraveled roads and the journeys never made, of homes that will never be mine, the music tears at me and its beauty sears and wounds all over again. Oh God, may the music never stop…





Painting, "Light in the Forest," by Viestarts Aistars



"Thursday" is part of a 7-day series.