Light Reading

A tribunal of candles sits atop the dresser, pale golden dancers washing the plaster walls with delicate light.  Their warmth, even in summer, a welcome addition and delight for the mind's palate.  Behind them to the left, tucked in the corner sits a small stack of books.  Journals, the handwritten relics excavated from a mind in search of its anchors.  The books glow in the light.

Shadows cling to the journals.  Profiles writ large on the wall behind them.  The pages themselves are orderly, but sport encrustations of tabs and sticky notes like bibliographic barnacles on bookish pilings.  The notes are but placeholders marking words, sentences, paragraphs that at some point in the past were deemed significant enough to warrant commemoration.  But in the now, they fringe of notes seems a reminder of thoughts unfinished, of tasks incomplete.  They have their own nostalgia.

The candle flames waver subtly in near undetectable currents in the close air of the room.  For a split-second it may have created the impression that ghosts walk in this room.  The notion does not seem so far-fetched.  After all, the journals tell true stories about bearing witness to spirits that were not for this world.  The tomes contain passages describing what it is like to have traveled out of the body and brought back sights and sounds and memories of love and pain from the other side of the astral glass.

The shadows dance gracefully around the journals.  They shimmy with a sensuality all their own.  Contemplating them thusly it is not outside of the realm of possibility that the shadows themselves are their own stories.  New tales from the heart whispered softly and with deep respect for the past from which they grew.  It is the candles that have brought out this quality, this idea of stories as entities existing in light.  The eye watches the flames move.  The mind considers the physics and optics involved.  The heart follows the shadows and calls out for a new epic of love, to be written in the edges between light and dark