She had taken the day off work, and had taken leave from the grips of her hurting heart. She had driven along a winding ocean road, driving further and further from the frantic city, where she had left the shattered pieces behind her. She didn't realise that not only was she escaping from, but she was being pulled, drawn towards a music that she didn't know existed - yet.
She felt it in her chest at first, but couldn't distinguish where that faint sense - that distant harmony - was gently humming from. It was not so much sound, and more as if the night had crawled inside her, cold and blue and luminous, and swum across the giant empty ballroom of her heart. The space, which only weeks before, had been so full of pretty, coloured lights, and warmth, and laughter. Brimming and bubbling with songs that seemed to sweep her into graceful rapture, and a man who had taken her night after night, dancing for her, dancing beside her, dancing within her. Dancing. Dancing. Dancing.
Then gone.
Sweeping through her chest in cool, rhythmic pulses, that song of starless nights continued as she drove, now growing in it's faint crescendos, almost knocking the very breath from beneath her lightly heaving breasts. She hardly noticed the dazzling morning ocean playfully dumping itself onto the beaches she drove passed, wondering only how, to breathe beneath the pain.
Soon the road turned inland, and though still winding, now it made its way through tall, ancient forests, canopies above and fern thickets below, and silence but for the purring of her car, and the swimming depths of blue inside her, strengthening still.
She was strong and resilient, but she felt trapped inside herself, and did not know what to do to escape the wrenching hurt inside. She slammed on the brakes and came to a skidding halt, and tall forests bent eagerly above her. She eased herself out from the drivers seat, and sat on the ground in front of her car, and held her head in her hands. Then she heard it. An ancient chorus of broken souls calling her name; calling her name in breathless, endless harmony. So haunting, and yet so lovely.
The swimming sense churning coldly inside her, beautiful and dangerous, was moving in time with the rising and falling of those voices, asking of her things that she could not understand. She stood, and gently pulled a fern leaf from in front of her, and found herself at the mouth of a gaping hollow of the oldest tree she had ever seen. And it sung for her, and it sung beside her, and it sung within her. Her little car still purred gently behind her, as she stepped forward, into the voice that knew her pain, into the voice which filled her, and the filling of her was better than the emptiness, and she stepped forward once more, into the mouth of that ancient hollow, and was never empty again.
Now her breath is the cool south wind, and her heaving breast the swaying, bending trunks, amidst the forest that called her name. She is home amongst the beauty of the broken souls, who sing together for those who couldn't escape the pain, who sing together;
who sing together.
