7

She didn't like the way her mind was suddenly leading her down a dark bramble path, hanging her thoughts on the thorny branches along the way. It isn't the thoughts themselves that are the problem; she knows this. It's the pathway in her mind that convinces her that the thoughts are wrong and bad, so she is wrong and bad.

Thoughts are nothing, she thinks, ether, wind, air. Let them breathe.

She opens her notebook, the one that is only to be written in, never read. The pen hesitates as she returns up the dark and twisty path to the beginning. The full moon casts a ghostly light upon the gnarled tendrils and her snagged thoughts flap in the eerie wind like discarded trash. It is treacherous going. She looks down to find her arms and legs are scratched, her body mirroring the state of her mind. Bleeding and afraid, she arrives, and turns, to begin again.

This time, she thinks, go slow. 

One by one she plucks the hanging thoughts off the barbs, reading them back to herself, writing them down. As they fall from her psyche to the page, the wind quiets and the moon begins to set as the sun begins to rise. With new light, the path is no longer frightening, it is simply an ancient thicket that has never been tended.

Written, the words magically rearrange themselves, revising what's true and re-read, even as they are being written. Revelation shifts perspective. Light betrays shadows. The Truth is impossible to ignore now; bad and wrong cannot exist where true love lives.

In her periphery, two butterfly shadows pull her attention as they dance on the pavement below. She giggles in surrendered disbelief as she understands that the outside world has caught up now, turning her new mindscape into a beautiful garden.

Who are we, she thinks, without our shadows? Only half of who we are.

- Still, Between