memory of a place you’ve never been: green-gold sea
You have been climbing – reach and catch and pull and swing – for long enough that the day’s work lost its grip on your shoulders and slid off and has been left somewhere far below. Long enough that your mind rests comfortably in the rough bark beneath fingers and the rhythm of rough breath, and restless worries are left below.
Breath deep. The branches tangle together, up here in the canopy, and you move by memory through green light and leaves – back braced here, foot hooked there, eeling up through a familiar gap – and then you are head and shoulders above the final leaves. Fit yourself into the hollow seat of three branches knotting around each other. Breath deep. It is sunset, and gold glints across the leaves that ripple, flash, sway away in an unbroken sea as far as the eye can gaze.
Here is the memory I give you: warm wind through your hair and on your face and bare arms, pale blue and gold overhead and rippling green and gold stretching out, an endlessly open horizon and a single falcon riding far off.