rumi fan fiction
what if the first story they were ever told was this one…in their beds at night before they ever imagined monsters or saw spindly clutches in the tree branches outside the window or felt the lick of hell’s fires in the damnation of their desires.
what if before any of that had the chance to materialize, a grown-up voice whispered that there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground — that the trees do it and the blackberry vines and the day lilies and the inchworms and the mice and the foxes and even the wolves and the grizzlies, even the fairies and the ghosts and the hermits and the farmers and the drag queens and the librarians and the mapmakers.
and what if another grown-up voice whispered at another time in another place that there are hundreds of ways to go home again and that home can be a place in the palm of your hand or a place at a picnic table in the park of a strange city or a raft in the middle of a deep lake or the next step on a very long trail or the three seconds at a stop sign.
or the dream you might have about carrying ice skates to a frozen pond in the forest where you glide in the form of your own silhouette until you fall through that which you yourself created and land under the surface in a pillow of belonging shaped from your own bewildering vision of home….and that someday it can be a story you have to tell…
