A dancing flame flickered shadow puppets across the fabric of tents. Snowflakes fell slow as a sleeping breath to the pine branches above him, a net, saving him from the bitter cold. Chesed took shelter under the rough trunks, shivering his way towards the heat and light of her savior.

The fire was a beacon, beckoning him closer with whispered promises of comfort and family. The light moved like water over an oily pan, waiting for a spark to be lit. Time moved like water over a rocky riverbed, bumpy and changing, erratic seconds jumping from stone to stone in a hopscotch dance to rival raindrops’ chaos. 

Chesed was a shadow along the white ground. The night was silent, adding starlit quiet to his cold. He pulled from his torn pack a journal, golden in his eyes, the key to his peace, each night a new terror fought off by the power of his pen and the happiness it brought him.

Chesed did not often write of his mother. The days since her disappearance ran together in his head like water and wine, each never touching the next but at the edge of dawn and darkness. The nights he lay awake in a daze were innumerable, and his voice had all but dissolved from lack of speaking. Chesed had become a wiry ghost, malnourished, silent, and haunting. His blue eyes drilled like knives into the soul of any who watched his wandering days, pulling from them every truth and penny from their lips and purse.

He had written only a few times of his mother’s fall into madness. She found solace in smoke, missteps and broken mirrors, staring at herself in vanity when controlled by the demon that was the drug hemp. Chesed had shrank from her embrace for fear of the darkness within her, how she threw herself blindly into the hold of an addictive death trap. Chesed wrote like a child possessed by the spirit of an epic Greek poet. His fingers held callouses not born of his hardship but the furious passion with which he scribbled for hours.

“On the Fall of My Mother”

Rocks dig into my hands, fingers grasping desperately at what doesn’t exist, the handholds that have disappeared before my searching eyes. I hang in a precarious balance, between life and death, sanity and madness, between earth and sky, between saving my falling mother and leaving her happy, that wretched happiness that was written against my will into the being of my mother’s every day. I can see her heart pounding in her chest, fluttering like a bird with nerves of steel wrapped tightly around her chest, constricting breathing in her flight above the waves.

Some people think she’s crazy, and she may be, but she’s never broken anything. Throwing herself off the cliff of drug-born stupor is the definition of suicidal, but she laughs as she flies down the rocky slope, air curling around her thin torso and whipping her fiery hair around like a candle flame in a winter breeze, flickering and faint, but unwilling to go out without a fight. I watch as she twist towards the freezing sea, waves sending spray flying up for miles, pounding the shore with a rhythm of “You will not, you cannot, you will not, you cannot.” But she can.

She glides like a bird, bones light as air, and I can see from my post that she is not afraid. No fear weighs down her soul, she has let it all go. Wings are not springing from her shoulders, but she flies. Time suspends itself, even the clock stops to watch her fall. It all comes back as she hits the water like an Olympian, no splash breaking the breakers’ pulse. The world holds its breath, hoping she still can. She arises like a mermaid, hair arching, dripping shining dewdrops. I may breathe again, for a time. Mayhaps next time I will catch her, but will she slip from my fragile grasp?  

January 15th, 1943 Chesed Demopoulos