I wish—to have a wish.
It is the hour of higher dusk—when shadows grow heavier, folding themselves into the hollow curves of the body and the earth—a quiet beckoning pulse beneath the ribs of the world. The day slopes down, slow and sure, as if tired fingers were pulling the light from the sky. Trees stand at the edges of vision, their outlines black as ink spilled across a pale page, blurred where the dusk swells and softens. It presses against the skin, a bruise that blooms without color, where once longing throbbed bright and fierce—now a dull ache, stretched wide like an ancient wound that refuses to close.
And still I feel it, that absence, vast as emptiness itself, a hollow vastness whispering in the silence. A wish—just one small, fragile wish—would suffice to silence the old incantations, those black-lettered murmurs I pressed deep into skin, into the tissue and blood of myself. The spells I cast—quiet, persistent—against the mirror that would not hold me, against the self that shimmered and slipped away like water spilled from cupped hands, never to be gathered whole again. The echoes of those spells falter now. Dimmer. Yet the sorrow remains, shimmering gray and cold—like fallen sequins scattered across a dance floor.
Now, in this liminal hour when the sun draws back his hand, retreating beneath the horizon’s edge, when the world leans into a silence, a crow rises—a black comma punctuating the amber sentence of the sky. And for a breath, just one breath, I find peace. Briefly. Utterly. One day, I will give my body not to another disappointment folded in the shape of man, not to the weary cycle of yearning and abandoning, but to the crow. I will feed it. Let it take what’s left, let it clean the ache from my bones, let it pick the last poetry from my ribs and carry it skyward, not in mourning, but as flight.
But my lips—let them be like young sparrows, soft and wild, mouths open to the breath of the world, trembling on the brink of flight. They do not yet know the trick of the wind but stretch—endlessly stretch—toward the sacred newness that waits beyond the dusk, waiting in the quiet, waiting in the pulse that beckons the heart to begin again.
Oh — that is a wish.