Flying on the Wings of Imagination
I can see it, clear as day, as if I’m looking in a mirror.
Years from now, when I’m old and gray, I’ll be sitting on a bench on the porch of my tiny home far, far away from the hubbub of city life. Somewhere no one can find me. A porch facing the mountains, their peaks crowned with pure white snow. Just me, the mountains, and all that vast, all-encompassing quiet. Away and alone.
My choice.
My dream.
My face, time-chiseled and etched in wrinkles. Crinkles near my eyes. Two deep laugh lines holding my mouth dearly, never letting go. Deep creases across my forehead telling tales of a time where I took life more seriously than it deserved. A contrast. A version of Thalia and Melpomene playing on my face.
A small black-framed pair of glasses perched on my nose. My weary eyes– still hungry for words and stories– scan over the yellowed pages of the book on my lap. The book, a constant companion through the years, blessed with old age like me. A book I’ve loved all my life. A story I know by heart.
“This inscription could be seen on the glass door of a small shop, but naturally this was only the way it looked if you…”
My once long, silky ginger hair, now cut short and heavily affected by the ravages of time, cups my wind-kissed cheeks in a snow-white curtain.
Shivering slightly as a cool autumn wind blows, I tighten the red shawl around my weak and now smaller body, hugging myself with my shaky hands. My hands. Another story. Skin over bones; no flesh in between. Well, nothing considerable. The skin transparent, the veins visible, like the roots of an old tree. Wrinkled and cracked knuckles, as if the skin has been cut deeply, except it hasn’t. It’s only the footprints of time’s passage over flesh and bone.
As I turn the page, my hands shake. I close my weary eyes and listen. Listening to the birds chirping, their wings flapping in the distance overhead; to the wind blowing, dancing merrily with the bare branches of trees. I listen to the squirrels running around, climbing trees, playing, and storing food. The birds, the trees, the wind, the playful squirrels– they all know better than anyone what it means to live. I envy them that.
As is the way of old people, I’d fall asleep just like that. When I open my eyes I am breathless, awed by the sun setting on the horizon, giving the blue sky a tinge of orange, red, and yellow. The sight before my eyes is a painting of autumn trees surrounded by the orange halo of a dying sun, their own lifeless leaves carpeting the ground beneath them.
A forest of fire.
I can imagine all that.
I can see all that as if looking through a fortune-teller’s glass.
It makes me smile.
