15 More Stories from the Oak

The Sun Returns

Day 354- Bees Know You

Staring off into the distance, like it has secrets untold. Perhaps the horizon is whispering a story of ages gone by. Is the Sun, right next to that cloud, trying to tell me something? Do those clouds form a letter…? Blinking slowly, trying to read the Morse code of the universe, he sets on a rock, unable to think of what really needs to be thought. In the horizons there are no challenges, in the leaves of the tree there is no sadness, no bad news. They may tell him of the past, present, or future… but never will they utter the words dreaded. “We don’t know where she is… we were with her one moment… then… gone…”

The last word, gone, like the ending of a sweet symphony. Gone. How is that possible? Nothing goes… nothing… Except my sister. She managed, when all else cannot, to slip the shackles of her physical body and simply dissipate. Right before their eyes, gone. He thinks these thoughts, thinks of pasts and presents, but not futures, because how can there be a future when one moment something might disappear. Just like that, a mole down a hole. Eying his hands suspiciously, he wonders if they too will pull a vanishing act.

And before his eyes, they do. The edges start to blur, the color turns white, and becomes transparent. “No, I cannot allow more to disappear,” he whispers and looks off into the distance, where the Sun disappears but comes back. You will be like the Sun. You will just take a short break on the other side of the world. He holds on to the one hope. She will come back. I know she will. He waits on this rock, for one day, then two, then three. She will come back, just like the Sun in the morning and the moon at night. She will.

But she doesn’t. Instead what comes is a painful need for water and a thirst for food. His body reminds him that even though she is not here, he is. His stomach is not vanishing. Sighing deeply, and not forgetting, not giving up the hope that as the sun rises, he leaves the rock to look for satisfaction for his here-body. As he walks down the road, the sun hits the top of his foot before the rest of his body. It glows a rosey-yellow color. The color of the living, he whispers to himself. The color to respect.

I am here. She is not.