Two Traveling Thoughts -- Prose by Aime Lyn Helbane

Some Prose About Two Travelers

I have chosen these two short pieces of prose by Aime Lyn Helbane, which are about two different subjects who,  each in their own ways, are travelers. They don’t merely travel across physical space, but also travel across epistemological and spiritual reality; their physical travels reflect the psychological and spiritual travels.

 

Restless Nomad Heart

“Bird,” by Lisa Runnels.

Once there was a traveler who had the eyes of a hawk; he could look far, far away and see what he could see there and then he would visit the places he had seen. You see, he was not merely a traveler, but a seeker as well. He held his eyes near always, because he used them so much for everything. If he had no eyes, how could he know when he had found what he sought?

So he lived and he searched, and he wandered, and he searched, and he searched, and he searched, and one day he found with a shock that he was rotting within his own skin. How could this be? He was always trying so hard to keep moving, so that the poisons couldn’t settle. He couldn’t know he had been carrying those poisons the whole time.

He also did not know that when he thought his hawk eyes caught a glimpse of what he thought he sought that it was ever only a mirage — or, more accurately, a reflection — and it confused him greatly when he began to question his own eyes, the very artifacts which had carried him this far, and aided him so much.

Yet all the things he saw and passed by in his search screamed to him in voices his dull ears could not hear: your eyes will never find what you seek because there is one place that you will never see with them. And the rocks by the path, and the flowers, and the sun, and moon, and the wind all wept for the tragedy of his continued footfalls, for the fool, himself, was the only one not privy to the joke he played on himself.

 

Dracosynesthesia

The wind beneath my wings paints my humming flesh in hues unheard of by any rainbow. The tingling tickling of thrumming hairs against timpanous armor plates somehow lifts me higher, octave by octave, seven plus the first again — such a wildly colorful value. I can smell the joy and the blood of browning reeds whipping up from the rhythmic oscillations which bear me aloft on the ever-flowing breath of the upper atmosphere.

Ah, identity is but an amorphous shadow of an individual — or is it the identity that casts the shadow when separated colors become opaque lenses vibrating with so little energy? The brightly violet words of omniscient eternity echo through my buzzing brain like four-dimensional representations of sacred geometry. They channel themselves through gritted teeth, leaving the residual taste of lost knowledge resting at the edge of my gums, blackened by years of learned apathy. I was not always this harsh to the inner ear.

If home is where the heart is, mine was surely built amongst the most symphonious of stars falling from the cerulean-chilly November sky in clattering minor keys of fiery red and orange. One day, I hope to make my resolute return to the harmonious houses of infinite lovesong and heartshine hues far more brilliantly than I arrived (with strands of muted colors attempting to run straight and narrow, but tangling into dissonant squiggles of confusion).

Two Traveling Thoughts -- Prose by Aime Lyn Helbane