The Measure Of Good
written by: Ximena Escobar
@laximenin
My heavy heart dripped down her arms. The scale already knew it; they all knew it would thrust the feather off the brass plate.
I watched the feather spin silently as it flew like an arrow through the air; my fate was sealed already but my face followed it, turning under the arch of the gold ceiling, all the way to the silent explosion of my shattered illusions. The story was truly over; my book’s back cover had just been turned; there’s always more to the story, but not this time.
She tweezed the feather from the floor. I saw it reflected in her iris; the measure of good staring unfeeling at my heaving void; the hole in my chest opening, begging; it wanted my heart back– like my heart wanted to return home.
But the measure of good, cold as the stillest horizon, clean as the straightest cut– unfeeling, unquestioning, resolute; only blinked. She accepted all colours of the spectrum are necessary.
The world’s balance was my injustice. This weight that toppled the scale, this bag full of stones that sank me, it was full of footprints, cavities spooned by my dreams’ abandons; wounds, holes, perforations of the arrows of pure light hearts, ungraspable feathers blowing out of my hands as I trod in the mud of every day, dragging my love in the hem of my skirt, unable to stay afloat.
Perhaps I wanted something that was never meant to be mine.
My heart begged inside the walls of her fist as I watched her go; and I never knew what followed, because nothing followed. I fell, without a heart to care, down the slope the weight of my loss created; and here I am, in the tasteless aftertaste of my journey through this earth, sitting on the bones of my indifference. Here is where I wait for death’s boot to squash my faintest echoes, when someone, here or there, may remember what I once meant to them.
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