Desreal: anyone;

I will leave in the hills a bit of myself--
The heat of my eyes which saw them bloom;
And cicadas, nesting on thorny branches,
Will sing out the shrill cry of my desire.
- Anna de Noailles

Acacia returns - can tell that she is returning - to the dark green comfort of the glade. It is a sheltering comfort of shadow from leaf-bud and bracken (tangled, thorny) that throws itself over her slim haunches and pale shoulders.

She undergoes a transformation in the green-dark peace of this place that is without the trill of a bird first thing in the morning to greet the sun that rises and fights to fall through interlocking branches of larch and aspen. Pine-sap scents fill her nostrils and a small gust of wind rises from underneath her feet and starts to swirl about the body that is all thinness and smallness to extremes - she is the size and shape of a yearling, elegantly awkward and full of the painful jut of bone - but the wind embraces her, swirls about her and fills itself with hot gust after hot gust. These small gusting breaths gather dust and dirt that whirl about her, gently so, for she is without ire and strangely, without fear.

So too, is she without an intact memory of all that has come before. It is as if all else has been chipped from the ivory façade and left flawed but unrecognizable. Acacia senses the loss of something in herself - perhaps these very memories that once lent substance to her being or perhaps she senses that the loss is more localized, somewhere within the pale breast, where a heart still beats - slowly and surely, but does so without love’s residence in it.

As she passes beneath the boughs of the larch and the aspen and the pines, sunlight finds her face and brightens it; her mouth curves in a smile and the simoom winds that stir about her in their infancy, seem to possess a calm in their revolutions that comes from her. And then perhaps she pauses and recalls with a touch of frustration that mars her face and casts it deeper into shadow that does not come from the loss of light beneath the trees that crowd close, but comes instead from a surfacing tendril of memory that fades and flutters and moves about her mind in imitation of smoke. “I’ve lost something.” she states with raw, quiet simplicity to the glade; her voice as sultry as the simoom that pulls at her hair and throws it into disarray.

Once it is said and she frowns, she then forgets and the peace returns to her - fills her up until she returns to aimless revolutions of her own about the glade, all circles and whirling and calmness.

Acacia;
perambulating dust