What’s life without challenge? Peaceful, you say? Ha! Not only have I decided to undertake the #atozchallenge, but I’ve generously allowed everyone to have a 9-day head start! (She says tongue firmly planted in cheek.) 😉

Seriously, though. The words just aren’t coming easily. The wrong ones, yes. The good ones, not so much. But enough procrastination.

BTW, I’ve changed themes three times this year. I am now doing ekphrastic creative writing. I am choosing a noun of the proper letter, looking up an image that uses it as a key word, and then writing something inspired by that image. Here we go. The first word is: ABYSS.

The Bridge

Sometimes she doesn’t remember being young. A child, yes, but not young. The way other little girls accrued Barbie dolls, she assembled worries she never released, did stupid things then worried about repercussions. Bit her nails to the quick and fretted uselessly.

The only time she felt truly unburdened was when she turned the music dial up just loud enough that notes swarmed around her like butterflies and cherry blossom petals. Swirling, falling, gyrating gracefully, magic mystically. The notes became her, or she became them, feeling the lyrics as if she created them from the disassembling of her own cells. She danced in circles, pirouetted into a nirvana cumulous, landing gently, cradled in cloudy layers.

As she grew up, the dancing stopped. The worries didn’t. They grew bigger and formidable as she grew. On the very gray days she even forgot music existed. She just heard sirens and angry voices and fracturing noise, a cacophony that put her teeth on edge.

One day she heard a song curling through her window screen. “Dance, just dance,” it told her.

In her kitchen, with a stalk of celery in one hand and a bell pepper in the other, she did. She danced, laughed, raised her chin upward, closed her eyes and danced as music spilled over her and through her and became her. And she may have even sung at the top of her lungs as the lyrics poured from her as cells of her own creation.

From that evening on, when gray days threatened, she said the magic words to fill her world with music and she danced like no one was watching, finally understanding that it wouldn’t matter if they were.

end