Golden (the weight of other’s expectations)
I'm not your fucking golden goose
and I will not lay your basket of eggs.
My body cannot be your basket either.
These bones were not built to be a beanstalk,
and I will take no man to the clouds
you cannot climb my body
you will drag us both to the ground.
I can spin no thread to gold
I can barely wind a noose
and if you put anymore weight upon my spine
I'll tie myself to you
sink us like a cinder block
in a river bed lined with gold
ashame no one will find us here,
not so golden after all.
The Fates
He twisted his fate between his fingers. The string was so short, so fragile. Everything he had ever done, had ever seen, had ever experienced – all of it was contained in this tiny string.
Today, that string would be cut. The three ancient women hovered over him, one of them holding a pair of scissors, another holding the eye they shared between them.
He had come intending to face his fate bravely, to give up his life for the sake of another, his beloved. It had been an easy decision.
Yet now that he stared at the string, his string, he hesitated.
Once that string was cut, there was no going back. No second chances. The weight of it hadn’t hit him until now.
He glanced at the three witches, still hovering, and then back at the string. No. He wasn’t ready.
He turned and ran as fast as his legs would carry him. As he rounded the bend, he tripped.
The last thing he saw was a rock as sharp as a knife slice neatly through the string.
Dulls and Sharps
The air was as bitter as a child's first attempt at lemonade. All sour, not sweet. Lemonade, it's just lemon juice and water right? Wrong. You just made sour water. It's not just the way the air here cuts you, it's the way it smells. The air here even smells sharp. Yet, it's not as sharp as the grass.
The grass, dulled by the grey of the sky, licks your ankles with sandpaper tongues. If a balloon were to miraculously fall, you know it would pop before it hit the ground. The grass is so long it reaches past your sneakers, clinging to you like sinners burning in hell trying desperately to claw themselves out.
It only makes sense that the sky, the midpoint between the air and the grass, was so dull to contrast the two of them. If the feeling of grogginess and utter exhaustion had a physical form, it would be the look of this sky. It was dense and deep and all-encompassing. It was the kind of sky that appears in a horror movie on the worst day of the protagonist's life. The dulls and sharps and bitters of this landscape merge and twist your perception.
You've been walking for a while, but all you can see is grass and sky. If you believed in the Christian god, this would be purgatory. Forever a blend of sharps and softs and bitter kid lemonade.