Heliotropism.
She passed through the dimness of a glass window, the rhythmic nod of her steps marking the beginning of a seasonal rite, beneath the blue canopy of the sky that greeted that Tuesday morning in quiet accord. From the folds of layered coats, she carried her little sun, circling it against the shiver of that cold April.
As she walked, the stretch before her narrowed into a single stem of sunflower she kept in sight. She murmured about wounds long neglected, smiling now and then as if a happiness as vast as a mountain were waiting at the mouth of a weary hollow.
“We are not yet old enough to be wounded and yet we have already burned and parted.”
The man believed God never stands by in silence, yet she thought him a liar; that story would never be reached, as though fate kept rearranging the pillars of its own tale. The woman with the bright, crimson-tinged smile was like Icarus; she tried to gather both dawn and dusk from the pair of beautiful eyes she had met the year before, though it was his ego that became Helios and scorched her first.
Thirty-two fallen suns slipped from their stems at the very ground where she stood— now dead; shedding, birthing a harsh reality alongside the delusion of feeling. From a bed and a room of faithful routines, like a family portrait in which the two of them had never truly existed.
(rinzsu)