I am most relieved when I lose sight of it. When my heart is face up and my mind has wandered off to play with butterflies.

That niggling in the back of my brain, uppermost veterbra beneath the skull, where all thoughts comingle and threaten to ruin me. I am chosen. I know this. But I am flailing, broken bird with broken wings in a broken cage.

How would it have been back then? To follow and walk and be thrown on a path of utter destruction? How would it have been to imbibe your own stench and the taste of metal in your mouth, walking endless miles to nowhere you can’t even imagine?

Is it any different now? The natives tighly woven around me, and I can hardly understand what they’re saying. I am not of their world, I’m of the next one, but the looks on their faces make me doubt even that. They call and talk in a language I once knew but can’t quite make out any longer. They bark and call at me, strange woman in a stranger land, the blemish on their brushed canvas.

And circling around me, I walk to their rhythm, taken up by something that is easy to see but so hard to explain. I have nowhere to go but up, so my eye go there. Exposing my heart to their readied arrows.

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