The Hushed Horizon's Golden Glow

Chapter 5: When the Civil Dawn Cracks

The mundane routines, the hope-carvings, the repeating patterns, the self-inflicting blues and violets. I'm not saying that those days are over, but it is better now. I got up from my bed. It was the earliest I've gotten up since I could even remember. I opened the curtains to let the soft, sun rays in. I walked up to the kitchen and made my favorite coffee, made pancakes and glazed it with maple syrup, and ate it as I admired the seemingly still sleeping city from my balcony.

I was the witch of my own world. That's probably why the white witches furrowed too horror-struck, as if I'd schemed something to sabotage solemnity. Yet there was blood, dripping from my knuckles, skeleton clicking back in place. And it was the moment their gazes softened to a realization, that what's standing in front of them was no longer the creature who chose to chain herself, but an awakened dragon thrilled to dance with the fire. A century of comfort and cowardice has done nothing but torch the coals, by that chimney stood no shadow after all. It was all me, and my inner demons.

I started spending my days doing the things that made me feel alive. Painting, writing, going to the library, going to the cinema, walking. I stopped spending my days just staring at the time but.....

.....the clocks have been cruising me to coldness. Not the cruel, agonizing kind where I find myself lost in the mist of midnight madness, neither the core-crumpling, bone-crushing one where I lie down with a few dried flowers in a gothic garden tied to my soul, nor the intense feeling of suffocating in open air as if I'm being sucked dry. It's more of a solace. A strangely soothing sense where comets swerve into a coil, and jewels align itself before me. Like I've been scooped out of an inky depth by a net, and dipped in a sunny-skied lucid lake.

The high noon sun was refreshing. The people were lively and the flowers were in full bloom. Life started to sound like that one childhood summer again. I went grocery shopping, it didn't feel like a chore anymore, and my favorite coffee shop looked like sweet nostalgia again.

Gradient droplets on the car's windshield during sunset appeared like a colorful canvas, a rainbow I could touch. And I keep frequenting a honey lemon-tinted, dust-textured time. It's like a palette of olden yellows; a tainted town of truths swallowed, of secrets scarcely spilled. Where pixie dusts drizzle in dreams I desire of dashing into, where the sun and soft rains hum, in the hollowed hours of slow, dreamy afternoons. Where laughter of the lost echoes, their footsteps a lovely tune. Where pages freely flip beneath branches, birds flying like dragons, and silence, a medley of elegy and euphoria. Where ghosts of grief grin, and cobblestoned gardens of cracked codes and unknowns collide. Where a cacophony of ear-splitting cicadas slices through sullen silence, where spells I'd casted upon myself unravel like confetti, and calvary I catalyzed would tangle around my throat. Yet the once skin-teething thorns now exude elixirs, rushing in veins, painting palace of phantoms purple and pink, graveyard of grays, green.

Once running away doesn't feel like evading the court from all the crimes you now regret committing but to run after the freedom of new beginnings, darling, just keep going.

The purple was blending in with the peach, but the white birds were flying so beautifully, I like to think those are us in a parallel universe. I like to think you're sitting under a tree on a peaceful piece of land somewhere with an old friend, drinking coffee and laughing over old stories.

I looked up at the sky, I smiled and uttered, "We'll always be five."

It altered to apricot. That quondam scathing sepia now tinged with a xanthous glow. The empty eve that once stitched with catastrophe now coalesced with mellow coastlines and constellations. At long last, the seemingly perennial winter tide is now calescent, frost deliquesced, and though the horrors camouflaged, hope beamed, and the horizon glossed golden in my eyes. And that, somehow, was mollifying, and was more than enough than I'd always thought,

—to keep me going on.