The lamb knows not of her galling contradiction.
The pastures plead for her graceful saunter, and the meadow begs for the sustenance of her charity. The rain descends from the sky, knowing that its fateful plunge will land on her generous tongue. The sky smiles upon her to the rhythm of her pulchritudinous intonation.
She is silently glad she does not speak the same shrilling poetry that I speak of, although she would never tell me.
She cannot comprehend my contemptuous corroborations, the mesh of all my thoughts, the jumble of my words. Her benevolent verse scoops and sways on paper that does not plead to be read. Her readers express their gratitude before being handed the crumbled letters that spawn from my broken lead, every sentence written on a different line, every paragraph thrown aimlessly between the other.
I wish to utter the shame of my apology to her. Not for the reparation of my uncommitted corruption, but to let it be known that I—not gentle nor graceful, not sweet nor tender—wish the meadows could cherish my corporeality as they do to her.
For I am aware of the incessant nature that burdens my expendable rambles, the ones that never seem to end soon enough. The traipse of my humiliation is a creeping, arsenic smoke that wrings itself around my neck at night, splitting the moon from my sky and dangling the relief of solace above my weary eyes. The gaze of everything I am not and never will be lies in the eyes of the lamb, whose smile mends this hellish empiricism.
“How do you do it?” I want to ask her. Is every fiber of her bone—every tendril of her being—a warm embrace? When she is finally released from the restraint of my unshakeable omnishambles, does she take a deep breath of oxygen and thank the meadows, the rain, the sky that she is not me? Does she ever labor over the notion of being so calm, so collected, so serene? Or, a revelation whose truth would leave me entrapped from cradle to grave? Is it just the unostentatious way of her lineage, her heart, her fate?
Standing on the threshold of her perfection, the paradox of reality and unattained aspiration, I trace the outline of her grace with uncertain fingers. I desire her quietude, to emulate her unconditional gratitude, her fingers unscarred by the harbor of secret struggle. I wonder if she holds her contest as tightly as I do or, perhaps, if her toil floats away with the wind, lighter than the air and adrift in the ether. On the horizon of my lips, yet constantly dissolving, I want to tell her that I, too, wish I was the cloudless dancer on the stage of life, unbothered by the paranoia of critique that she will never know.
Perhaps such a dream, such a fruitless transformation, is nothing but a mirage; it is forever out of grasp, drowned in my unrelenting inquiries and burdened introspection.
The lamb, unfettered and eloquent.
Does she know that she is all I want to be?
