My voice has been silent—dormant yet existent, waiting to sing beneath the waves.

A wall exists within me, crafted from bricks in my mind—old and heavy, as if shaped during the Romantic era, passed down from my father and his fathers before him. I run along the wall, desperately searching for a way around it, but I cannot. I touch the brick, feeling it crumble and the roughness beneath my fingertips.

For a moment, the wall flashes and disappears. I can see beyond, where the mind treasures secrets long buried from my past.

I imagine a body of water, the ripples along the surface, clashing, interweaving within each other. Pondering what lies beneath it, yet seeing only what exists aloft.

When I conceal myself beneath the water, I suppress the essence of my truth. When I disguise my emotions, I camouflage the ideology of what I represent. I do a disservice to myself and to those I encounter along my life path. I am the one that suffers the most when I am the one that prefers to hide. If telling the truth feels out of place, I need to ask why I am discerning that way and why revealing the actuality feels wrong when it is right. Something within me is choked, barricaded, so much that I must create a fictitious world. A world that I acknowledge as truthful. But in reality, confronting and accepting the truth will set me free in the end.

If I choose to confront it, I can emerge from the water. The fervent or calm façade of ripples only exist beyond, because a body of water constantly but not permanently remains. If I decide to emerge from it, I am free. Free from it and free from myself.

So today, I will be who I am.

Aschalew plucked an orange rose, which turned to sand that sifted and meandered through her fingers before meeting the dirt between her feet. So, she plucked another, hoping that this second flower maintained its shape and beauty for her to admire a little longer. As she broke the stem from the bush, she pricked her middle finger along with its thorn.

Open like minds on the day of the solstice, the wayward sky encapsulated the town with a warmth of quaint shelter. A dome shaping so wide around the vast flat land as it held air so breathless in the light of the star-kissed sun. His hands meandered through the wind of the grass that tickled the skin of his palms, as he turned his head towards the sensation, the grass strands poked gently into the bosom of his cheek. Here whispers the land of the living skies. Skies that speak to him and move him forward with their winded bellows. Skies that whisper a twinkle of adventure to him, as his eyes reflect the ventured display of stars at night. The narrow river shot through the town, its current flushing itself rapidly, passing by bridge after bridge, until there was no fervor to wish itself forward any longer.

She was left breathless, heavy, as if the world she had braved and grown to accept, deteriorated into a fine porous dust that slipped violently through her fingers. The reality was almost surreal at this moment, speechless yet screaming, as if all people around her moved methodically slow, almost caught in a replaying still that would continue timelessly until it was stopped on demand. Stopped, by a remote that she, unfortunately, did not have, nor would she ever control. Her mouth was parched, eyes tepidly were swollen, as her arms and fingers rang with a familiar weakness. Her shame and worthlessness began to choke her, as she questioned the triviality of her existence. She glanced around being sure to not be seen, and quickly repositioned her hijab, checking twice to be sure her neck and hair were covered.

Mr. Candlemeyer’s lawn chair sat there silently, empty, and unfolded on the east-facing patio of his quaint 3-bedroom apartment. He often left his patio door wide open, welcoming the blare of the desolate sun, as it slightly burned a part of the cement ground that the orange patterned lawn chair quietly stood upon. The air of the apartment basked in its introversion while a large pine isolated the kitchen from the view of most of his prying neighbors. Two plants grew side by side in bland colored medium-sized pots, alone, yet firmly aware of their surroundings as they slowly pondered their age and growth. The railing that surrounded the patio was made of thick black iron, and the bars that circled the patio caged its abode to the visceral reality that surrounded it at times.

The collection of moist crust that accumulated over the course of the evening prevents your eye from opening easily. So, you rub at it mindlessly, flicking the crumbs to the side of the bed. You arch your back, stretch your torso and extend your arms wide-reaching for imaginary apples hanging from the sides of your bed. With your arms outstretched, you lay there motionless, observing the blank wall, listening in on the dull silence of the morning. You shift your body to the left of the bed and come up to a seated position, you feel lazy, lethargic, then deeply slouch your back so much that you begin to feel a minor stretch along the back of your neck.

Mentally prepared, Neermala shifted her weight towards the branch to her left, reaching her arm out wide for the incaved hollow that stood before her. The hollow would normally allow her to hang freely, supporting her usual hobble-like leaps from one branch to the next. Though at that moment, as her arm stretched forward, her eyes distractedly caught a glimpse of a lusciously ripe green guava fruit, and for a spilt second, she forgot what she was doing. Instead of gripping hold of the hollow in the tree, her fingers violently grasped the air just below it. Her feet had presumptuously already shifted forwards towards the second branch. Though, this time, her feet were unexpectedly surprised by the fact that her fingers had missed the hollow. Thus, her descent towards the ground began.

I revel at this moment fictitious solace, as I peer out my window at the moving trees as they rhythmically dance to a tune of misplaced sorrow. The patio door is left ajar, as I listen to the echo of birds humming in the distance. A cool breeze travels through the small slit in the doorway and trails itself by weaving between the cracks of my toes, tickling the hairs on my feet, and ruffling slightly between the bottoms of my dark green sweats. I try not to think, but my mind rests heavy, unsettled, and perturbed. This moment proves to be fleeting, as the delicate wind passes by briefly and dissipates into the harsh tendril-like air of a true disordered unknown. This solace is false, fake, a performance it seems.

I was brought back to the memory as my niece took her first steps towards the stage. I remember how her braided corn rolls polished the reflection of the sun.

The sight of a child instills us with this sense of nostalgia, an aching to be who we once were. An ache, that forces us to remember to the days when a naive fragility resided within our selves. We are reminded by our desire for such longing when a cold breeze gently slides across our cheeks, bringing us back to when we swung on the swing-set as children. Striving to reach for the sun until it was gone and there was nothing left but the moon.

A Mother. Once, forever and for all.

She is innocent, honest, helpful, kind.

Naïve perhaps and meant to give.

Her siblings she cherished, she watched them grow tall, and cared for their every call.

Obediently willing and out of obligation she married,

all while the fear of disapproval churned in her belly.

She moved forward, stale, steady, and at an impasse

Watching as the birds and cars passed by slowly.

Finally, she took strength. Solace she stood her ground. She chose and she left. Aware of the call, of the whisper, that streamed forth in her heart.

Adelína Moráles ruffled her fingers gently through her hair, and let out a sigh as she lay amid the wet soil of her family’s fields. The stalks of the maize plants that she had been tasked to harvest indefinitely shaded her body from the subordinating glare of the sun. The apertures up above in the leaves of the plants allowed for dapples of sifted light to perforate themselves onto her clothes. She glanced down toward her abdomen and noticed a Corn Flea Beetle resting upon her cattleya-tinged shirt. Gracefully, she hoisted the creature onto her fingers as she lifted her own self to a seated position. She examined the gold surface of its shell as it aimlessly crawled along her palm and up her forearm. She was astonished at how such a vibrant insect could cause devastation.

You’d think that my endless journey could sustain such dreamlike fantasies. Yet, the truth is? That is never the case. Somewhere inside of me, some place deep within, I feel a pit. A Churning black liquid tar that eats up anything in its midst. An emptiness that I cannot ever seem to fill.

Well this has been a rather miserable day. May I begin by saying, that I do not understand why such random occurrences like this so often tend to follow me around. I truly must be some sort of Velcro that attracts crazy bull shit. Get this, one of the regulars at the Libiliem coffee shop this afternoon just fucking died. Literally, he looked at me, and then fell over. All right, there’s more to it than that, but whatever.

I contain an anti-gravity. My torso is first to shift towards the stained-glass ceiling, where the sun seems to pour so generously through. The rest of my body then follows rhythmically answering to its own catechism. A dance that is comparable to the distant hum of a cello even. Time has eroded it seems, I am still, yet gliding slightly, swimming perhaps.

Even the pores of the glass shards whispered a shimmer. Halted upon, as if each individual fragment had been forced to freeze mid shatter. In passing, perhaps the glimmer could be likened to that of a diamond chandelier. Though if one were to gaze onward, to look past the beauty of such stillness.

So she ran. As transient as her own two short limbs could take her. As far as she could go from the interior of herself that she could ever possibly achieve. Yes. Can you not see it? The distance between the two is so minuscule, but yet long. Even so, she is so certain of the fact that if she were to slice off her forefinger on the outside? It would still remain on the in.

Bounded by a motionless state of solitude, Fjör found himself sitting cross-legged in the center of a meadow deep in the forests of the Selkirk mountains. The vast, empty yet open surroundings wisped him into a moment of reminiscence. A tiny crowned kinglet flew over his head and into the coniferous trees that surrounded him in a uniquely symmetrical circular fashion. This took him back to the moment when his mother had first brought him there.