Flowers

--- las flores estan muertas (the flowers, they are dead)

           I had been reading for several hours while sitting in a comfortable sofa-chair on the wood-slatted deck perched on a bluff overlooking the ocean.  In the last light of the afternoon, a steadily rising disquiet led me to put the book away. The words on the pages had awoken an ancient part of me that had lived the stories I was reading. I didn't want to know where the stories would take me; or perhaps I knew already. Troubled, I stood up and walked a few feet to the railing at the edge of the deck seeking shelter in reality.

           The dying light of the sun gave birth to a hazy moonlight barely able to penetrate the darkness. My eyes were drawn repeatedly to the white gleaming churn of ocean waves crashing into the rocky stretch of beach below. The periodic faint sounds of the ocean's heart, the quiet of the birds and the other animals in the dark, the night's air suffuse with the dim glitter of moonlight, all helped calm the turbulence within my mind. Eventually, I turned back to pick up the book I had abandoned earlier, and settled down again on the sofa-chair to continue my reading in the light of a small but fiery gas lamp on the side-table.

            "The flowers, they are all dead."

            I looked up from the book, but couldn't see you. The dark had really settled in now, and the lamp's light barely extended past the chair. Your voice had come from so close-by, but I couldn't find you with my eyes. My mind, on the other hand, you have never left.

            Carefully lifting a dried and pressed flower from between the pages of the book, I held it out, "here is one."

             "Only one of many."

             I still cannot see you. All around me the dark seems to be closing in. I look carefully at the flower. "It is a purple flower with red tears down the middle," I say.

             "Yes... doesn't make a big difference."

(There is a real place, a most beautiful place, called Aspen Fell in SL that inspired the setting of this vignette. If you haven't visited yet, you should.)