dimming bulb
so bright, so light, dim it down.
everyone in the garden has grown taller like bamboo after rain while I grow an inch shorter for each drop I take. everybody lean into days with an ease, my memories have forgotten the texture of. disturbance rolls off them like water off healthy bamboo leaves. And I watch this daily, swallowing the shame of it, that the same rain, the same soil, the same garden made us so differently. That I cannot blame anything except whatever is wrong with me.
i watch them from below now. The sky they live in is a different sky — bluer, wider, generous in a way it has never been with me. They don’t know this. They think sky is simply sky. They have never known a sky that withholds. And I have never known anything else except guilt that feels like calculated sin, like the sky looked into me and made a reasonable decision.
Everybody is high up, heads dissolved into that blue generosity and clouds once I dreamed to reach. and I buzz around their shadows like a wingless housefly — frantic and small. the shame of it is specific because I remember when I casted shadow too. I remember when I was the height others measured themselves against. I was taller: taller than them, taller than grass, taller than lemon tree. I was great. I was bright. I was high and I was better. i had an insatiable will to reach. I was green and growing and I believed the rain was mine. i believed I deserved it. That belief feels obscene to me now.
Maybe I overestimated. Maybe the rain grew envious. Maybe bamboo was never meant to believe in itself so completely. I return religiously searching for the reasons for exact moment the garden ceased to choose me, the exact fault line in me that made reduction inevitable.
Slowly the drops began choosing other stalks. And I grew shorter. Not all at once — that would have been merciful. Inch by inch, season by season, quietly enough that I almost didn’t notice until I looked up and realized I was looking up.
Everyone is ascending and I am descending, growing smaller in the same garden where I once cast shadow over others. Now I am the shadow, the dark shape left behind by taller bodies. I have become a measurement. A contrast. Proof that the rain was right to choose elsewhere.
The tall ones don’t look down. Why would they? The sky keeps offering them new things — colors, I used to know the names of, a horizon that keeps expanding for them, rain that arrives like a gift specifically addressed. I watch them and I try to assure myself: that their height is vanity, their sky is borrowed, their rain was luck and they are nothing but someone below me. I repeat this until it sounds true, until the truth sounds false and until their names don’t matter to me anymore.
And still. Still. In the place where complacency ends, there is a hollow that precisely knows what it is eating.
I wish I were them. I wish it the way roots wish for rain. Bereft and wretched enough but nobody can measure the wanting and desperation.
Every breath feels suffocating because my windpipe grew narrower. Every vision blurs because light no longer bends toward me. Everything moves faster — seasons, people, the rain and I am the only thing moving in reverse. I try. I have always tried. I have angled myself toward light, loosened my roots towards water, reached until reaching burn. Nothing. The trying is its own humiliation , to try this hard and remain this small.
I hear my own fibers tearing because the reduction is faster than I can adjust to. Smaller, duller, less visible. The garden doesn’t mourn what withers. It finds existence around their dried countenance and limbs, and around my absence, filling the space I occupied.
Potential left me the way sap abandons a dying stalk, quietly, until I noticed only by how I stopped reaching. I grieve it like losing a limb. I grieve me that believed growth was still possible, that the rain would return, that sky was still a place I was allowed to want.
Faith grew pairs in it’s shoulder and nested somewhere I cannot climb.
My dreams, without it’s blood and bones, became dried bamboo rotting at the roots. Birds chew over them, carrying them into nests and into skies I longed to touch. how pathetic!! muscles, still alive, pray for heaven, when all it has to do is die to taste heaven on the tip of tongue. And all I had to do was let myself decay into putrid rot, let flesh recant itself cell by cell, until I became the thing that bird swing in it’s beak recklessly. And the guilt of it — that I let them rot, that I couldn’t hold them, that I was not enough to keep even my own dreams alive — that guilt has composted into the soil I’m sinking into.
The blossoming stopped happening inside me. It flutters now in someone else’s name, in someone else’s sky. And I am supposed to be fine with this. I have made a deal with myself that I am fine with this. i’m fine.
I am alone. Not absence of company but absence of equivalence. But I’ve always been alone. They loved me when I resembled someone they loved. They loved me when I was a height they could hold on. They loved me when I had a growth they could latch onto. Now I am weathered, but now, they have sky to attend to. they have dreams to follow. and absence of time to wait for me. but I don’t blame them. I would leave me too. I have been leaving myself for years.
Everyone in this garden waits for rain. But our yearning contrast.
They yearn to push further into that bias blue and I yearn to push downward to dissolve into brown — to stop being measured, to stop being the cautionary contrast that makes their height somehow beautiful, to stop trying in a garden that has made its preference painfully clear. To stop the specific shame of a thing that tried and tried and remained small anyway.
So I wait. wait for rain to sink. While they inherit the sky, I will return to the mud that made us both and wonder, in the dissolving, if I was ever really reaching or only ever falling slowly, mistaking the motion for growth. mistaking ruin for win. mistaking toleration for love and exploitation for care.
THANK YOU FOR READING THIS FAR.
Only love💕,
Prashamsa
Anatomy of Bruises.
OMG WE ARE SO BACK😭, and are you okay😞??
My goat I missed you so much