Come winter, the cloak of autumn fell silently on her shoulders. She looked to her left, brushing off the lint which slept peacefully next to her heart for over a decade. As light as a flint, it flew over her head, swirling in a dance of freedom, celebrating in a ritual of  sways, of slow risings and sudden dives.

Angel Wing, by Gaia

 

Yet as perceptively as it had realised the free fall, it would thrust itself upwards again with the force that had begotten its ancestors. Waving its tail, the lint said: "farewell my lady, the dust of years to come have been paralysed by the swift movement of you heart".

Words which had always haunted the lint, echoing wildly in the valley of her soul, for it had repeatedly reminded itself that this would be it, this is the moment where it would be free to leave only to find itself landing back again next to her heart.

She stood with the determination of a wolf, following the lint's every turn, quivering under her cloak. The lint was as vibrant as her fiery eyes, sending ever so thundering sparks of goodbyes with its colourless gaze. She knew at this precise instant that her fate lay beneath the wings of that gliding torment. The magnificent lint, well on its way, plunged head first into the unknown.

A window, which by a miraculous twist of fate, flung its arms wide open, beckoning that string of pointless dots to a journey of timeless spaces and dimensionless plots. The blazing winter wind blew suddenly stronger, carrying the lint on its back as far away from her, farther more than she could ever endure.

A hurried glance, storming the horizons with daggers and arrows, she twisted her head frantically left and right, but alas the lint was way out of sight. Confusing it with the greying tones of the barren landscape, an amalgamation of titanium white and pain's grey, it too had lost the traces which would normally lead it back to the mother womb.

A surge of light suddenly seized her wrists, setting off rays of streaming cobwebs which had bound her to that lint, sending them back into space. Feeling its way up her arms, the stranger slid under her skin, into her veins, brimming with yet more vibrancy, injecting itself  into her body, losing its luminosity only to feed hers, love had emerged with the vivacity of that of a hundred warriors fighting for her life.

And  in a glorious manifestation of will, dust of gold fluttered around her heart, nesting comfortably after a long awaited repose. The cloak had become warm again.

"I am free" said the lint. "I am finally heading towards my space, a refuge, where my ancestors have woven filaments of anguish away from the hearts of men. Where threads of sorrow pass through the eyes of black holes, vowing never to spin backwards.

Particle against particle, flowing harmoniously into the abyss of forgetfulness. Dimly lit by a reverberating star, the very fibre of their weightless bodies ignite in peaceful consolation. One by one, desolate in their joy, the life of an ash commences.

(c) Gaia