s n o w

does anyone know why snow inspires nostalgia? why it is beautiful and sad? why it creates the hush of dreams?
i want to know.

********

i am frozen here in the moment before the opening of an eye.

i can feel change creeping into my life, slowly, a gentle but persistant hand. i am again on the golden plain with the past and future laid out around me, waiting to take the next step. the future is not shining, it is the same sepia as the past here, and the wind moves through it in the same silent arcs.

i am here because i stand at a crossroads. because my heart aches. because i haven't called for introspection, for revision. because it has found me.
it is a lonely place but i am stronger now, and independent. i have those who were my wind to thank for helping me spread my wings.

this plain is haunted- empty, desolate, but filled with ghosts of the past. shades of friends and family and lovers disconnect wander aimless through the branches... seeking...

there is a voice whispering in my ear. who is it? it is me...
how can it be? i am here. i am real, i am one alone.

but her hands are in my hair, cold, and i know that she exists as another possibility of a thousand branches in the tree of life. and i am as a ghost in her world as she is in mine. yet she has sought me here... why? i cannot hear what she says...
she draws me closer, her lips are at my ear and they move silently with her message.

she is one of a thousand... but one of the few who sit at the crook of the large branches. she has gone where i could not. her skin has seen the same sun a thousand miles away. she is more pure than i.

the ghosts move across the plain. they traverse my future, they own my past.

her words move through my thoughts like wind and with a living breath she passes through me and is gone across the plain. i am forgotten to her as, in a moment, she will be to me.

why did she find me, why does she haunt the life that is not her own?

she has kissed these invisible lips with a poison that draws me after her, into the realm of the past, into the realm of the future...
these feet have still to wander...

i drift across the plain of my existence, a ghost in my own life, and i hear her words
she wants to be one...
calling me,

"come...."