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A Burden No More

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Perhaps you saw them when last you found time to wander past the local park: two figures set against the shimmering blue of the artificial pond - as at home as if they had always been there, as uncanny as if they might cease to exist as soon as you looked away. Like a memory of a memory, you can still almost picture them, and while you cannot quite remember, you will never truly forget.

He had been crouching in the dewy morning grass, his arms outstretched and every bird in the park flocking around him. They had been eating out of his hands, each one pressing its feathered wings against his body as if they could not get close enough. And you had watched in silence, and for a moment you had let yourself believe that this was the truest shape of worship you had ever seen. You sympathized and, perhaps, even understood, because never before had you seen something so beautiful, so approachable... so utterly real and yet strange beyond words.

In the moment before you finally glimpsed away, you had seen the sunlight glint off of his snow-white hair, and though you were briefly blinded by the wonder of it, still you could see every colour - real or imagined - reflected back at you.

She, however, did not look away, and as your gaze slowly settled on her, you realized that she never would. Her midnight eyes remained trained upon the white clad boy (man?), and you knew that you were watching something very private, very universal. She had sighed softly - sad and hopeful and simultaneously everything else - and you had wondered...

("How are you doing, little brother?" she had asked him, a smile upon her lips and a memory shining in her eyes, and his laughter had been the impossible music of a dream.

"I am well, sister," he had replied, and beyond a doubt you knew that this was true.)

...you had wondered if she was seeing him or the echo of the man (legend?) he had once been, the tragic dream of dignity and loss that still occasionally peers out of your mirror, though you know it to now be nothing more than a memory. You had wondered what she made of this man-child who now wore the mantle of her younger brother...

You had known, of course, in the moment before you had turned away and returned to your own life. You had known that he was now closer to his younger siblings - to the one who had walked away and the one who had broken and scattered to the wind like so many multi-coloured leaves. You had known that he no longer needed her as once he had - that he too could now shift and vary as he saw fit, and that the world was a burden no more.

And you had known that she too realized all of this, and accepted it, and if there was still some sorrow in her heart, she was too resilient - too much herself - to dwell upon it.

But still she watched him as closely as though she were memorizing everything he had been and ever would, and still you had wondered...