Monologue - Arrow

The sting of loneliness sets in. I can feel on my shaft the heat of an afternoon sun, dappled through the leaves above me. My untested brethren lay fletched together in their case, full of possibility, moving father and farther away from me. Their potential almost at its peak, while mine, of course, having passed me by in an instant. I’ve never before been alone. My life has been spent in the closest companionship of my kind, awaiting, cozed up, tips all akimbo, feathers tickling feathers, face down in a quiver, while our turn lingers in the future like a happy ending. When in fact.  

So much time waiting for that one moment of singularity. The moment of flight. Loosed. Shot like a bolt, shot like an…. Well too obvious. Over almost before it began. And here I am. There I went. Here I sit. Time moves on. While my self, the whole of me, begins already to come apart. Into parts I go. The feathers first. I can feel that lazily glued little third fluttering half off. That mistake. As it turns out, my defining flaw. The flagging tuft which came loose during flight, which caused me to miss my mark so widely that I never actually even grazed glory on my way into this stump. One following the other, teased by the wind until they wiggle free, my feathers will drift on the forest floor, tousled with the duff, until, like all things, they rot into the dirt and are consumed by the tiniest of mites. 

 My shaft, being made of a harder wood, it could be possible to outlast a few branches here and there. A thin consolation, and does it really matter? Certainly, I won’t stay long at this angle. A jaunty plucky strait-out, seeming almost reattached to the mother tree my body came from. Perhaps, looking so natural, a bird will pirch on me, loose a few droppings and feathers to join mine on the ground. Perhaps it will lend its clever little beak to speed my way to entropy. 

And the truly comical bit - the point of me, already lost. That most essential element, the fierce biting end, is now buried to deep to pull free, yet not deep enough to say, even as a turn of phrase; I am not buried in the heart of the tree. No poetic satisfaction. Sort-of close. And where is the poetry in that. Ah life. The cruel pranks of it. Only the ordained receive glamorous ends. While the rest of us spend the longest parts of our lives halfway to somewhere, yet no where near our mark.