valentine

The angel of plenty presides over the fountain where things can still be found long after they are left there. People and memories get left there, frozen in time, memories where the world—and the people in them—still believed that there was good. To the left and right of the angel lay two cornucopiae, filled to the brim with fruits of the harvest. 

There is no water in the fountain. None left now that it’s winter. Only the bare stones and the small puddles made by rain fill the fountain’s center. 

Someone has strewn petals about the fountain, some in the inside with the stones, some on the marble rim. 

I pay homage to the magic that was once ours. The magic that has been lost. The magic that left a cavernous emptiness where electricity once was. Dark clouds of fear have replaced the light ones of spontaneity and fantasy, floating above a place I thought would be a new home. 

We had the magic once, magic we cherished and loved. It was magic we overused, abused, took too much of without giving in return. We thought it would never run out, never grow tired of us. 

And yet, here we are. We are lost without our chaos magic. 

It bound us together like rope, pulling us constantly towards each other, keeping us together by its power. 

Now, we can barely be in a room without the tension—a different rope, a different feeling—pulling us taut, pulling us away from where we were.

Change is good, or, at least, it’s supposed to be. The change that brought the magic to us was good, or at least it was supposed to be. 

Chaos Magic knew we wouldn’t survive without it. That’s why it left us. It decided that we were too unworthy to wield it, that we lost sight of why we were gifted with it in the first place. 

Maybe there will never be a way to get the magic back. Regardless if things change or stay the same, if we make things up, forgive, hate, regret, etc., we may never be worthy of the magic again. 

If that’s the case, I’m quite thankful for the time I got to spend with the magic, the magic that didn’t belong to just one person, the magic that flowed from person to person, filling each with a sense of childlike whimsy that in some ways our pasts had robbed us of. 

And yet. 

Here, I pay homage to the magic that made me feel alive. Here, at the fountain, I lay out six petals for the six who first shared its warmth. Here, I remember all that I have seen through the kaleidoscope lenses of Chaos Magic. I have laughed and cried and loved an felt and now all is different. 

I have yet to define what it all is now. 

Here, I throw the petals into the fountain, where they touch the water and the stones, flying to rest where the magic had been felt. 

May we one day be worthy enough to feel the magic at least once more.