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The Phoenix

She sits out on the edge of the highway overpass listening to the drone of tires on wet asphalt. Holding a two-inch twig between her fingers she remembers a time when smoke and ash would fall from such a place. She gained inner warmth by breathing in the poison like it was a fresh taste of reality. Maybe it was just a veil of hope she hid behind. Things always felt so much more whole, but things also felt much lonelier at the same time. She knew she had been where she was supposed to be just one year earlier. She knew she had made it and there was a nice little golden statue on a shelf back home in her dark apartment to prove it. She had a title and a reputation to uphold. She knew people respected her and understood that anything she said came from a place of experience and knowledge. None of that mattered anymore. Now she wonders if any of that really mattered in the first place.

Dragging the small stick against the wall she feels it splinter while the sky’s tears rain down upon her head. Watching the headlights come and go and the brake lights slow and pause she knows that her life is headed somewhere else these days. Her life is headed somewhere different and even the history she held in her heart wasn’t strong enough to keep her from thinking how much nicer it was somewhere else. Always hearing that the grass is always greener on the other side she found it hard to remember a time when she didn’t have a place to go from nine to five. She didn’t truly recall a time when she wasn’t the hard worker who gave up her time and slept on the floor of an unheated trailer if it meant someone higher up might just notice her dedication. And you know what… it worked for a while; you could say it worked for almost two decades until something happened, and the floor fell out from under her. She never really knew who set the ball in motion, but she knew that the fire burning inside needed to go away because if it didn’t she would never move on… she would never live again.

With so much pain and hatred of the past she watched her breath form a vapor against the shimmer of the lights both white and red. She pushed out everything she had experienced in the past year in hopes that it would all go away and never come back. She knew that what she had experienced had made her stronger and wiser like a soothsayer in some wacky wizard novel. With the slow blink of her hazel eyes she flicked the twig out, far and down onto the damp overpass until she heard a sickening snap under the tires of a big rig.

For her, she knew it was all over.

For her, she knew it was time to live.

For her, it was time to be reborn.