Memory

The sky is a bright blue, unwrinkled, untainted. I sit by my desk, overlooking the window, paper ahead of me, pen straddling my fingers. A flame appears in the distance, as if it has just burnt a hole in the sky and crawled out of it. It seems to relish its sudden freedom, zealously roving around the infinite space at its disposal, unwilling to settle down. And then, as if it had turned towards me from the heavens, I feel its gaze upon me. As if it had two tiny eyes, as if they were united in looking at me. It takes off from its high perch, as if it knew that I knew it was looking back at me, and descends into the mundanity of the land beneath its sky.

As it slowly approaches me, the flame drips colour onto a psychedelic canvas and takes a life of its own, a flaming piece of vibrant life, a butterfly. My eyes dissolve in its colour as it whizzes about the greenery in the distance, away from the window, shy of approaching me. But then our eyes meet and it hesitantly makes its way towards me. Unsure of myself yet acting as if I know exactly what I am doing, I lean closer to it, and whisper gently, as if afraid of hurting its tender papillae with too harsh or grating a sound, "Is it you, is it really you, my love?"

A pause. Like a giant swaggering backwards to go forward, reality surges backwards, in a huge heave, dragging everything with it. A shuffle, and as if time ripples in the moment, memory's slate is erased, the window dissolves into its past as if the precise converse of the breeze blows now, right down to the tiniest detail, the butterfly’s prismatic wings flutter backwards, beat after beat, as it makes its way back into the heavens it descended from, my words fly back between my lips, my neck cranes back of its own accord, the ink slowly drips back into the pen as it retraces its own words, the paper blanks itself word by word, letter by letter, the instants devour themselves, and the words start all over again.

This is it.
Burn, memory, burn.