Book for my "October NaNoWriMo Prep" project! |
The sky is weeping today, through the haze of gray clouds that have hung there for months, blocking even the slightest glimmer of sun. As such, it is damp, the kind of damp that seeps into your bones and settles in until you creak and moan as much as old floor boards in the wind. That isn't to say that there isn't a sort of morose majesty to the place, but it is a majesty that is best reserved for crashing waves and white-walled cliffs, salty sea air glazing your lips and tongue as the wind whips a frenzy through your hair. It is quiet here on this plain and there is nothing to be seen for miles except for wet, drooping grass. On a sunny day, this same grass would shine emerald and a soft breeze would play tantalizingly with your fingers and the fabric of your clothes. The sky would seem endless, a vast cerulean dome of wondrous possibilities. A place where you would at once feel large and small, simultaneously filled with the exceptional perfection of the universe and your own mortality. Today, however, the sky weeps and you wish you could weep with it. Ahead is a tree. It is almost miraculous in its solitary grandeur, the unlucky offspring of a larger forest, stolen in its nascence by a migratory bird and subsequently left to live its life alone. As if to make up for its loneliness, it grows lush and green, with full branches and in a near-perfect half-dome of leafy canopy. Its trunk is notched just so, as if begging for a wanderer to happen upon it and choose to climb. It is an apple tree, this tree, although it is doomed to remain fruitless, alone and separate as it is out here in this secluded plain. This does not stop the tree from blooming, though, a profusion of sweet-smelling flowers. It does not bloom today, however. Today it sits and waits, as if it knows that something will happen to it soon. Something big. And so it waits and it prepares, alone and unmistakably verdant, for its own, and quite miraculous, destiny. |