A Morning in Three Movements
BY: EMILY HIZNY
She is dreaming. She sits in the middle of her room, in the center of a stick circle she collected from outside with lavender incense burning behind her, now she’s free climbing a redwood tree and adding magenta and cerulean filters to the sun before she realizes she can change it to gemstones and kaleidoscopes—rubies mingling with sapphires and shimmering opals, now she’s dancing along tide pools looking for crabs made of amethyst and the floor of her bedroom is covered in white sand, a mandala of overlapping circles but the middle is for her, just for her, and she doesn’t know any rituals but the stick from the birch tree in her backyard fits in her hands perfectly, so she ties her birthstone necklace to it and whispers the words of a watercolor sky. She is dreaming.
She is waking up. Slipping down, down through water with a weight on top of her, a blanket or the belly of a fish, fingers ruffle her hair as molten magma vents warm her feet, she’s climbing a coral rock wall and fighting her way to the surface but what she thinks is up is only deeper. Deeper into color, into comfort, into wrapping herself in gravity. She takes refuge in a cave, a pocket of air’s emptiness, and when she takes a deep breath she’s in a cavern lagoon tinted peach with the hues of a rising sun, someone moves beside her and she’s slipping again, the edge of a wave taking her hand and proposing but she’s still looking for the surface, looking for the bottom, looking for sun, looking for sand. She is waking up.
She is awake. She is sitting on the ledge of El Capitan with her legs dangling over Yosemite Park. She could slip, she could pray, but her hands are covered in chalk and her harness is still attached. She could fall if she wanted to, but the mountains are too pretty, too sheer and overgrown, the valley looks like a crater filled with moss and fuzzy toothbrush trees, it’s a place she needs to sit for a while. So she drinks in the sunlight and her partner sits down next to her with an open bag of M&Ms and offers her a handful. She eats them dusted with the chalk of her fingers and she laughs at her partner’s own white handprint on the bag of candy. The wind blows the little wisps of hair out of her face and it’s only 11 a.m. but the world is unfolding in front of her. She wants to jump, to glide through the valley as an eagle but she’s tethered to her partner and to the cliff so she turns, lays on her stomach, and hugs the mountain, her arms only spanning square feet and her partner laughs. She is awake.