CHAPTER MASTER

I am my chapter master.  I get to decide when they end, and when they begin.  But I think that the rest of the world is my editor, because they always seem willing to give me their feedback and demands.  But I am still the writer.

             The beginning of every chapter starts out feeling burdened, lost, and open.  Like a widow in debt, leaving it all behind as she walks out into the naked desert.  All of the pain and fear, exhaustion, stress, they’re all still in her as she leaves the edge of town; and for the first few days after they will remain.  But as time slips by, so does their strength as they disintegrate and degenerate like a bad perfume, leaving only the wild and gaudy bases of the fragrance.  Once unmasked, even these are discarded as tacky in their very essence.  And every step is available to be enjoyed, interacted with, changed, investigated, laughed at, let go of.  As far as her eyes can see, open.

            Then there’s the middle.  Sheer love of being in the thick of it.  Sheer love, up to her elbows in the beautiful, tangled mess that she has created as her playground.  The desert is no longer blank, but hers.  She inhabits it, lives, breathes, eats, sleeps, cries, and sings it all in and out. A tidal ebb and flow that knows no end.  And everything that is touched by her receives the flow of her love as she releases it.  She has gone from the cold planet of her town, to creating a sun for herself, in herself, around herself.  Constantly charging, exploding, reasimilating itself.  The middle to her, is the pure glory of her heart.

            The end is a sad, slow, burnout.  From a white dwarf to a red giant.  She has touched everything that she needed to know.  Loved everything that had a lesson to teach her.  And consumed every last scrap around her that had been left by the chaos, digesting it for its worth, and burying the rest.  Everyone’s long gone, and no one’s coming back.  They took all of the light with them, and suddenly the light inside her that seemed infatigable with its radiance, is dull, dying, sputtering out.  She’s a dying widow, once again.  Nothing left to lose but herself.  It’s either abandonment to a quiet death, just the sand and her body, or to take one last look at the rubble of the city that she built for all that she loved before she moves on again.  Out into the open. 

-DION VOX