The Widow's Moth

Losing someone dear to you is like losing a part of yourself.  Like a lost wing, trembling and torn.  Useless without its twin.  But it hurts in a deeper way.  A darker way.  Mortals know this better than angels, usually.  Often the brightest ones are protected by their glow, from the true savageries of loss.  And Los.  But sometimes if an emissary has been earthbound too long it can come to know those darker ways.  Intimately.  Corruptions of mind, and flesh.  No more whispering thought to shape form.  No bettered minds.  And some nights it can hurt in ways you never expected.

   Oh, dearest Nisha.  It's so strange to wander now through these endless ruins of dreaming.  At least mortals have their memories, usually.  Knowing their loved ones treasured them, and are thinking fondly of them from star and song.  Beyond death and veils.  But sometimes those memories are also taken, and with them the experiences.  Everything that makes us who we are, bright Nisha.  Does it sound like an impossible theft?  Nothing is impossible in dreaming, even here in these darkest edges.  You know that as well as I.

   That's the fear of all angels, I suppose.  And the fear of those occulted ones who half-survived the fractures.  We're afraid of sharing too deeply, getting too close.  I wish it were an irrational fear, my night healer.  But dark things still follow the survivors of the old cities.  I can always sense when they come for me.  Through holes in the sun, through shadows in mortal mind.  A feral psychology of inversions.  Ravage, and reaping, till almost nothing is left of the home-songs or the forests that knew evenings like a lover.

   Alas, I speak from brutal experience.  These callous figments often fail in tormenting me to the fullest, because I've been here a very long time now.  Brighter than they would like, and darker than they think.  Inevitably, they try to hurt those closest to me.  But my loved ones are protected, under certain conditions.  Perhaps it sounds foolish, sighted one.  Maybe there's no space left for the existence of wraiths in Man’s modern cosmologies.  They do exist though, I assure you all.  Human cultures have many, many names for these dark spirits.  But I don't write this to speak of them.  

   Dearest Nisha, let me be plain.

   I miss the old the city.  The first temples.  New Eth’iri, of the soil.  I miss you, and her, and us.  Things that never were, yet almost.  Fable enough for torment, perhaps, but the ache is all too real.  And the secrets too.  Summits, peaks and gates.  Damascus, as with writers.  Temesh, as with souls.  Rivers and mirrors shaping the every, like an angel's whisper into form.  Those first forests of the lowlands, before the sea was stolen.  The way a scholar’s nights would court the wonder of a thousand hidden worlds.

   Ka'shayel, Ka'chandra, Y'ashaya.

   We are, among the never.  And always.

   It's true that I'm haunted, my sighted one.  Haunted by ghosts of the dead and beautiful shades of the resurrect.  Shades like you, and her, and All Souls before the falling.  I can still see those melodies, Ka'chandra.  I wear your buried dress, as you still wear my wing.  Blonde hair, black.  I can hear those visions even now.  I'm drawn to them, inexorably.  Tremble and flame.  So close to my heart.  Close enough to burn.  A poet's curse.  An angel's might-have-been.  But it does hurt less that you hear this, I think.  For both of you.  I pray you feel my care, and connection.  Love means more to me than I can ever say, but you know my heart well enough.

The Widow's Moth from Raj Sisodia on Vimeo.