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.