Ado

Ado (When All Is Lost)

“But look, ” she said, “we are still here.”

“No we aren’t” I said “There is something left that was not destroyed, but it isn’t us.”

“Look,” she said.

I kept my eyes on the sunrise.

For brief seconds there was beauty. The smoke seemed to bleed through the light like the flourish of a dancing hand – a love letter on pink paper.

For the space of a breath, the thousand fragments cart wheeling on the breeze were pale moths journeying to find the moon.

Up and Up.

Catch them, they crumble. They are only the little grey ghosts of all the things we loved. Echoes that stain our fingers and nothing more.

“Don’t tell me this is love,” I said. “Don’t tell me this is the plan.”

“Please look.”

“I can’t,” I said. “This isn’t me. This is only a bottle of tears and if it looks back, all that water will be scorched away and leave nothing but a pillar of salt.”

I felt her grainy fingers slip away. “Isn’t it good to be salt in the world?” She whispered. “Salt can heal, it can purge and cleanse and protect. Maybe...maybe that is the plan?”

“And then what? If you are nothing but salt. What when all that salt is licked away by all the desperate creatures you try and heal? What when they have licked away the last grain of you?”

“And what if you break?” She shot back. “What if your glass-bottle-self smashes up against some hard and callous thing and all that is you spills out? You will have helped no one, not even yourself.”

She said it as if this ‘helping’ were the meaning and reason of everything. Perhaps that is the case when you are nothing but a condiment.

“I will never. Break.” I said.

I looked at the sunrise and the wind rising in the east and the path ahead through the hard, unyielding mountains. I looked for hope. A sign. A crow. A dove. Anything.

But all I saw was the wide wild world, a pillar of salt, a bottle of tears, and fire falling from the sky.