Sandbox

You may not know this, but I can see the flickering reflections that dance behind your eyes. I know them because you and I play together. We sit in the same sand box. We have the same toys. They were lonely till we found them beside the refuse. We saw the same beauty in their stains and fractured frames. Together they dance in our hands. We share each other’s stories as though we too could be the hero. They skate between bedtime tales and accounts of horror’s agony. They are not puzzle pieces searching for solitary safety, but tainted cloth torn from the same painting. Their colours run and fade between them, blurring their place in an inconsistent image. We compare scars. Together we revel in the blood we have shed, whilst watering the thorny bushes that are stained red from writhing. We laugh at the parts we’ve clothed and cringe and the garbs of others. In this sand box we do not build castles or dig holes. In the sand we right stories in a language we cannot speak and draw images we have never seen, only to have them lost to the wind. You may not see this behind the cataracts, but I have not played with one of you before. As with the others, even with all my toys in the sand, there remain some games we cannot play. But this is our box, our toys, our colours and scars, our parts and garbs, this is our sand. I will stay and play with you in our sand box, for despite all that I see in your depths, they are still only flickering reflections dancing behind your eyes.