Lazy Days
Lazy days, taking on a colder tone—consistency; the one thing is knowing you’re alone. Too fragile for this world, feeling too much, loving too hard. This is all of me, I have given to you, and I just can’t see my way home anymore. The mirror reflects a stranger, pale, pasty, sick. The carefree sun-kissed girl slipped away, seeking solace and safety, I can’t find her here, the walls close in, the people, humanity, I am too fragile for this place.
Constraint, suffocation, I drive and drive, escape does not come. Concrete and brick gradually slip away, blending with the greenery, vast open spaces of grass, fringed with eucalypt. Traced with memories of what once was, replaced with the humanity of order, shape, and form. As far as the eye can see, the land is pristine, cultivated, medicated, and mediated.
Gravel crunches under tyres as I roll into the car park, here the trace of memory is close enough to touch. Eucalypts hang low over water, the clear brown of it, stained with their roots. Clambering out of the car, the first breath, reborn into the land I once called home. My need for this place, this space, I run back to it; breathe deep, drink it down, like my Gin on those lonely Saturday nights.
Gravel pricks cruelly into my feet, crossing the car park, a penance for the length of my absence. The only way I can get to the water now is to cross the punishment of these stones. I drift away, to days when cool grass, and fallen leaves, paved the way to the water’s edge. Toes finally kiss the wet coolness of the river—another breath, deep. I slide right in, let the water take me. The silence of the rivers flow fills my ears, light breaks through the trees, as I lie here, looking up, entirely at the river’s slow mercy.
I am above myself here, looking down, drifting, free. The only place I can ever truly be.
© Sarah Arber 2020
