The Sepulchre by the Sea
Can you hear me, over the rain? I feel like one of those spinning-top girls, the ballerinas in glass jewelry boxes who don’t know to start dancing until the lid’s up. (Oh, the thunder’s too loud, I’ve missed my cue.)
These words are coming to you from the library tower, a multifaceted gem of a building, six stories high and made of clear glass alight a tower of stone. We keep the books for sorting up here, lost treasures and beautiful things people have forgotten how to read: a dictionary of lost words, the little known poems of e.e. cummings, manuscripts from some of the classical greats. They’re damaged soldiers, bindings strewn across the dusty shelves and pages upon pages collecting like day old party confetti on the floor. It’s beautiful.
And it’s like a sepulchre, really. My words come here to die. In the tower the take flight like little sparrows, bouncing off the glass like southern flies trapped in a screen porch confused by the meaning of walls. Here no one can silence me, my echoing footsteps last indefinitely, scoring my words with sweet, soft melodies. A thumping baseline to compliment the crisp turn of a worn page or scribble of ink across fresh paper.
Because I never talk like this outside of my glass prison. My word’s aren’t well-acclimated, they wouldn’t survive. They turn into yes pleases and no thank yous and that’s nices and fuck yous. There’s no room for pleasantries anymore, soft asides, proclamations of love spoken in soft tones. We text and fret and forget.
Fuck you.
