She whispered inaudibly in Adam’s ear, words under her breath and meanings under her consciousness, subsuming his with the burden of blessed familial opportunity, nothing more than a baby boy, and to his shame, Adam’s shadow self shirked what she laid on his shoulders in less than a simple symbolic sense.
The house in which he sleeps clicks and creaks and works into his waking thoughts with its incessant worries. It pleads for plants inside the single-panes and for spots of paint here and also there, and it warns with sleepy, sidelong glances of what will fall without any more weight laid upon it, which he hauled home in his trunk from the big-box where seed still hasn’t sprouted between the curbs.
A sleepless, evil impulse lies dormant deep in these foundations and cannot breathe fresh again until inhaled into the lungs of a worried man, organs eager to lose grip on the promises of self-imposed community, the readiest of responsibilities that would otherwise find fertile soil in a wandering man’s aimless longings.
Instead of putting it to bed in its infancy, Adam sucked in deeply when last the chance reared. He disdained the ballast that would have pulled him straight from home to home. So rarely do the skies clear and constellations align though every moment is a turning to or from. The lodestar shines clear still, clearer now.
See the gift laid at your feet. Though you must take it up and though it will weigh you down, before long you’ll have built the strength to ease the cramping strain. Before much longer you’ll lay the burden back down at grander feet and find a crown, a life’s blessing beyond measure, beyond reason, and beyond the trifles you could no longer hold in gnarled hands that filled with and formed against their fitted holds.