Fear

The glass walls caved in with a roar a yellow storm that broke the faulty veins that had been up till now Invisible. And I, clutching a rag of paper in guilty hands curled up at the end of a dilapidated wooden bench at last doing what I should have my whole life – Late, once again, on the one day lateness is not excused. I have always imagined the world ending with a shattering of stained glass we had painted to portray the thing we called beauty, and that had shined vulgar colors on us for millions of lives; a jolt of awakening from some nightmare into something that cannot be as easily defined, for in all minds it is a different message; a violent wrenching open of the hidden crack of light in an atlas that had seemed impenetrable, endless – but the entire time had merely been an idiot’s doodle. In that moment whether it be in a dream like this or in some mad state of visioning the feeling cannot be snipped and trimmed and stuffed into a four-letter word, for it defies all language and pulls the strings hanging from mind and soul and stomach pulls them and plays a cat's cradle game with them and leaves the limbs wild and dancing with the silliness of a drunk man’s misery. And yet all fell back into order when I opened my eyes from a dream that had the power to awake, and glanced at the rotting walls. There seemed to be tremendous joy written in them, for I saw at last their stains were of glass.