Dum spiro, spero - By Peauladd Huy

While I breathe, I hope.

– Cicero

To sense abandonment is a disease uncured.

I lived at the mercy of my keeper; it’s hard pleasing her, this keeper of my destiny. What fate lifted up resembled the same bits and pieces of yesterday. At sunset, I felt light pangs sweeping in my chest. The loneliness found nested advanced from courtship to laying eggs. I must hurry before new wings hatched up and crowded out that old terror. By now, old memory roused up a little more each day; young wings grew strong flapping away topsoil. Not long to the next layer and, the next should unearth my poor dead mother. I must see to it alone.

This journey felt old: that I, a full-pledged pro, with the rights to boast the wears and tears by my eleventh year of life-travel. I’d more than recognized that the high of wanton to belong had long passed its manic phase. Small pangs spritzed big words for the gods for tomorrow, since today was a lost hope.

The sun ripened the sky. Another day was gone and another day to wait. A child closed her eyes in a make-believe world; she reminded the gods of recent words had long forgotten by men.

How many more times to say this? How many more ways to wring out the old feelings of being left behind? A dull gray suppressed after the sun left. When everything was dark, I confronted gently the horrible absence, not at all passing blames.

How many more days the gods had absented themselves. In this vast blackness behind my closed eyes, again, I evoked and begged fate to hand over the rest of me. I made best between me and my idols. Now it’s all up to her.