I return to my timelessness with dreams—forgotten, phantom-born. Now my soul dances in oblivion, and angels pilfer like thieves of sleep beside my soul. I return to my timelessness with memories dear and unforgettable, and every word my interlocutor spoke turned mute in the pale screaming greys of shadow. I return to my timelessness with castles of illusion built high. But thunder fell, and lightning shattered them, and the blue sky became a groan. I return to my timelessness with the broken wings of an ugly bird, aching in its wounds, with gasps that fail, its wings slack after a failed flight. Going back to my timelessness, I pierced my dreams and buried them...
# Return I am not the same person who left. The roads I travelled have left their dust on me— a fine powder that won't brush away, that has become my skin. I return with borrowed gestures, words that don't quite fit my mouth, a hunger that no familiar meal can touch. The house remembers me smaller. The trees have grown strangers. Even my mother's hands seem unfamiliar, though they still know where to hold me. I carry with me the weight of distances, the particular loneliness of arrival, the knowledge that leaving changes the thing you return to more than it changes you. So I sit in the old rooms like a guest, learning again how to be home, understanding finally that return is not a homecoming— it is a beginning, the first step into a life that has no map, that I must invent with every breath, every silence, every glance at a familiar face that has become a stranger's.
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