Beam Within a Cocoon

Moisture finds my face.

My eyes open, and I raise my hand to my cheek to wipe it clean. The city's on fire again, hugged by the darkening clouds that look like they've absorbed the nature of the actions that caused the fire to begin with.

Lately, I haven't been certain of what I'm feeling or whether or not I feel anything at all. I guess numbness is what happens when atrocity after atrocity is piled on top of you. It builds multiple columns on top of you, seals you up within the hole beneath, and soon you find yourself simply surviving.

Blind, deaf, and a ghost to it all.

Until you're on the outside looking in.

And I see the clouds edging so slowly, so carefully, so hesitantly towards the city. Their once-white wisps swirling in smoke-colored curls and marvelous formations. One looks like a round mountain and another resembles a dog leaping over a log. They remind me of times that seem so distant now.

I wonder if it's possible to fly up and enter through their world of cumulus and nimbus.

A loud sound disrupts my thoughts. I'm not sure if it came from my chest or the sky's. It sounded like a booming announcement: an announcement that refuses to be ignored. I actually hadn't heard that noise in a long while. I have become so used to the fires—the crackling, the popping, the hissing, the roaring, the rage. It was that background sound, that static, that white noise that just became part of a normality that makes a reflective person start to wonder when and how it became normal to begin with. When had the infernal air become like morning dew where someone expects it, ignores it, and notices its existence when it's right in front of their face or when it drops right on top of their head? When had the searing sensations been so customary that one pauses, not when another person weeps, but when the sky does?

Perhaps it had been all that burning that made me numb; but it feels different now when I see what it looks like when a city burns from within.

The plumes of smoke look smaller, the roaring is fainter, and the sensations are... Well, I don't know how to describe that. I just know it feels...different...

A flash occurs behind one of the thick clouds, a different form of crackling sound following. I'm not so sure what to expect. Are these clouds angry? Are they going to unleash a distinct form of fury? Or are they going to catch the attention of the fires far below them?

Something rumbles within me at that thought. I sense a swirl within my chest akin to roots unfurling within the soil. It's a swirl that I haven't experienced in what feels like a lifetime. But it's there now as I watch the city awash in its own undoing. It's there as I watch the smoke reach out and dissipate into the cloud that seems to overtake it in its power. It's there as I see a beam of something peek right through a sliver of the floating doom grayness.

That beam I see, that swirl I sense: it's like the multiple columns of agonizing numbness are atop a seismic wave of impending something. These columns atop us—atop me—seem to shift over the hole that they've buried me under. It's that same beam in the sky that pierces the hole: a beam that reminds us that we can grow out of the darkness of whatever cocoon we've enveloped ourselves in.

Ah yes. Maybe I remember now.

I close my eyes again...

...as moisture leaves my face.