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Cicadas on the hillside
When you smile, I don’t see it on you. Instead, before me is a woman I barely knew. The Who you were before trauma mutated, as it does, into the mistakes. And your mistakes are my injuries.
I brush all of that away now, as best as I can. You’re doing it again. Smiling with all of the potential in the world. Years are flaking off of you. You are temporarily new. Temporarily safe. I could hug you. I could try to forgive you.
We could move on from all that has been. The winding road paved by the mistakes could be disregarded entirely. The love between us could lift and propel our bodies. We could fly to each other.
In the background, cicadas are chirping. They are quite ugly creatures. The sound of their existence a bit eery. But they have work to do, and they don’t put any stock into how we perceive them.
We’re standing at the edge of a hill. The deciduousness is a welcome break from the rest of this Bible city. I swear, everywhere you turn a church is popping up out of the ground.
Here, you and I are not separated by religion. Here there is just us and Mother Nature. No history of men tearing us away from each other. No history of women learning from men to do the same.
You and me and the cicadas that aerate the soil and tend to trees and even in death help other things grow.
