Between Shadow

I often wonder lately if it is my shadow drawing me into dance and embrace, if the million mile journey is here in my heart and conventional wisdom would say that I never need leave home. I give my shadow name, because a shadow should not remain without a name just because it refuses to share one.

“Scáthach,” I whisper and it just laughs and twirls away. The mistress of shadows, in the castle of shadow, from an island far, far away. It is neither denial or affirmation, and I do not have the energy to play a neverending game of warmer and colder. If it is just my shadow, it would likely care less how it is named.

But I need a name and so give it one.

In the artists’ lofts and in autumn’s waning heat we played. It is just a place — our play takes place in libraries, on fogged hilltops long ago and far away. How goes the song? Over the hills and far away there’s a place that’s heaven… Maybe it was heaven on that hilltop roundabout, between the periods of rain. And here I remain after all these years, keeping the faith, even now… Keeping the faith, spinning and turning, to watch the flames of bridges burning.

Enough of songs. The troubadour inside is dead and those old songs he did not write were never meant for him. Those bridges were burned so long ago that not even char remains.

Instead, we dance with shadow in a sad song with neither beginning nor end, trapped in the gloaming between wolf and dog. Eventually, the blade.