🎃 Imagine this. You are sitting on a beach, cold and windswept. The sea is dark and angry before you. The sun sets in muted colors. You finish scrawling on the parchment. Your pen dries up as you reach the end of a story in 11 parts. None of it makes sense anyway. You're sick of having to dilute everything so far beyond recognition. But a story told through metaphor is still a story told. Even the great poet Sappho is survived by stilted fragments and mistranslated lyrics. Maybe that is the beautiful curse people like us must all share. Perhaps loving someone the world doesn't approve of forces you to be clever. You scan your writing once over, brow furrowed. All you can do is hope that it is enough. Of course it’s not. It never could be. You know this. And yet you keep trying, trying, trying. Your image is ten times bigger than you are. You have spent your life living in your own shadow. Stealing your own thunder. Trying and failing, relentlessly, to fill your own shoes. You roll the parchment, slipping it into an empty wine bottle. You may have told the story inside out and backwards, and it may well sink to the bottom of the sea or fall on deaf ears. It may wash up on a sunny beach in Florida, or a rocky shore in the northwest. Either way, someone somewhere will know about that recipe card. And the warm safety you cherish within your fence. And the heist that stole more from you than you ever planned on stealing from the museum. And most importantly, they will know about the human heart. The flawed, scarred, angry, grateful, nonsensical heart. The one that hides deep inside glittering ballgowns. The one that questions everything, but mostly it questions if the world it has grimaced through so many smiles for would love it for what it truly is. You drop the message in a bottle into the riptide. You fight every urge to fish it out before it drifts too far. You watch it until the waves have swept it far, far away. And now it is just a matter of time. The dripping of candle wax. The ticking of a clock. 🎃

-submitted May 17, 2023