Potted

She marks another birthday by planting a flowering annual in a pot, a forget-me-not for her forgetful mind. Nowadays she primes herself using visuals to clarify memories. If at dawn, a pale moon lingers long enough to marry a rising sun, she will dance alone, a slow crazy dance, up in her high tower, from there she can look across the rooftops imagining routes and paths taken the dwellings and bygone times, the loves, that bloomed and wilted in that city where she lived out her story. Wide boulevards and dank back alleys are stitched into a lacework of recollections; some structures no longer there return as landscapes printed on tissue paper. She sees herself as a girl, a younger woman, never as she is now. If a bloom wilts before the years end, she will sit by her upper window looking for the morning sun to ignite the pale moon of her eyes. Then only does she dance - her slow potted flower dance.