As the light of the sun arcs through a clear sky the silver sliver of shimmering moon disappears.

A red kiss on the horizon, a bath of blue up high, with orange, yellow and green sherbet melting in between.

Mountain tops sweat in new light’s gentle warmth, their snowy slopes fading fast into damp earth. Those dancing shadows don’t match the grace of the morning light playing on her face. The sunrise burns bright in her eyes, the color of conflict. As day breaks, her heart breaks with it, those moments in the morning when she’s lost herself in the heavens.

Her sorrow is a snowstorm, her battle is a rock-slide.

Behind those eyes rational thought and overwhelming emotion collide. Sometimes her feelings are a fever that lead her lips to quiver with the frailty of a curling leaf—clinging to hope in the heavy heat of an August evening before breaking from the branch to fall away—brittle and bereft of a beating heart. Then she is firmly frigid, holding back the wailing wind through a set jaw that would otherwise bellow and bare her simmering soul.

At times she feels a helpless victim to circumstance, as though she has no control over the current, no way to tether the tide, shift the shore. She tastes the salt in the air, senses the salt in her veins and thinks salty thoughts as a heavy rainfall travels from her unblinking eyes over the map of her face to those unraveling lips.

In her devastation she feels invisible, though she is anything but.

Velvet hair brushes her shoulders, a shallow valley rests over her lips, canyons lay at her collarbones, there is beauty in the trailing ridge-line of her spine and the curving contour of her hips. Her skin is flecked with freckles and sprinkled with scars, though the deepest cuts decorate her heart–carved like a tree trunk, nostalgia names past lovers and dates document vivid memories she couldn’t scratch out.

There are times when she feels ready to surrender, to be devoured by the sunrise, to abandon the pit of her body and leave it to be planted in the soil.

She wonders if she will be but a shell left for the worms, as her soul resembles an urn waiting to be filled with the ash of her broken body. She dreams of the morning her spirit will ascend to reside, caught between the blushing sun and the fading moon like the rising tide, on the golden shore in the sky.

Yet, despite all, she will endure and embrace every element the world throws at her.

She has not gone without faltering, not without great struggle against the weight of the world heavy on her heart, but she has fought fiercely against the demons in her darkest hours and persevered through the most perilous paths of thought that would lead her to a dead end.

With an adventurous spirit, an unpredictable and unshakeable soul and an unwavering will she goes on.

She is an eclipse, standing tall, head held high, a dramatic halo draping her shoulders, ready to take on the world.

Would the Earth still spin without her defiance pushing it that direction?

Would the sun and moon still rise without her beckoning them to join her for tea on the porch? Would clouds still gather without the challenge to rain on her parade, so that she may dance in their cleansing outpour? Would the wind still blow without her calling it to gallop through her hair?

The pace of life beats and she beats back.

Author: Star Nobriga

Editor: Ashleigh Hitchcock

Photo: courtesy of the author