Pebble on my path, you trap my toe and make me question which way I am going.

Pebble, you set me free – my fingers curl around your coolness, which sips the warmth of the sun.
When I hold you, I am taken into a quiet place beyond myself.
In and around myself, an openness that is always there but hidden by the noise.

Pebble, take me to the seashore: the edge of the land, where the water licks the sand.
Your home, you are set there in stone but move in strong tides, rattling over your brothers and sisters.

Pebble, I keep you on my desk where you remind me of what it is to be quiet and alone, without questions or solutions.

Swans glide, wings beat deep and wide – carving their migratory path through the south sky. Sparrows dive in the wind’s slipstream. Beaks pierce the clouds like the skin of a dream.
Soap bubble floats up high. Round window of rainbow light.

Tree branches finger the sun. At their feet, a thinker bends his mind in on itself until it finds the Oneness. His toes in the grass, clutching the dew. His eyes turn inwards and follow the ghost’s footsteps into the dark cleft of the tree trunk.

His heart beats with no surrender. His heart was once tender but his eyes are blank as a dartboard bullseye. A melody finds its way to his pursed lips and, without a kiss, he begins to whistle. Soft was the song, with notes sweet and long like drops of honey.

She looked down at her knees and sighed and cried and wished she were thin and that the birds outside would stop their whining. The leaves hung limp from the branches like discarded clothes. She tried to force a smile but her cheeks burned with misery and she could not remember how to turn the muscles of her mouth upwards.

His footsteps still sullied the hallway leading out. Always out. Never in to where she sat waiting. Her fingers fumbled the jewels around her neck, cracked and useless like broken glass crunched beneath boot soles that slammed in her face.

His lip prints smudged on the mug he drank from the day he left that sat next to the sink, unwashed, untouched. His words came back to her in a flurry of noise that now meant nothing.

He turned before he left and smiled as if he were pleased to be standing on her heart and wiping his feet before going out into the street.

She dropped the teabag into the saucer and watched the brown liquid ooze through its paper, staining the white china. Her cup was cold and the milk left an oily film on the surface of the drink. She licked her fingertip and looked out of the window vacantly, waiting as she had done every day since he had left two years before.