I will call you by name - any

[Mauve]

SO WHEN YOUR HOPE'S ON FIRE 
BUT YOU KNOW YOUR DESIRE

(It is close. She can smell it—flesh and blood and fur—but it does not provoke hunger. It does not wet her jowls or make her think of meat and blood.

It is a spiritual scent, made corporeal. Old and new; something she is distantly familiar with—)

She does not know if she’ll stay here forever. Forever feels like a long time, and besides, women like her are not made to stay. They are made to forsake forever and roam. It has gotten many of them in trouble, her ancestor mothers—it has found many of them in the wrong places at the right times, and visa-versa. It, this wanderlust, has broken hearts and separated fates, for a time.

Or forever.

Home has been a concept painfully fumbled over. When it seems that they find it, they wander on, instead. The jungle had been buried under a hundred leagues of anger and rock—otherwise, it might have been Mauve and Fleece’s home. Had mother not known war to furrow its skin and make it scary; had grandmother not mistaken it for a graveyard and vacated for, mother hopes, happier pastures. Had it not been razed to the ground and replaced by new kingdoms made hastily from the stuff of the old. 

Then, it might have been the Gates… 

(Love is a curious labyrinth, too.
But Mauve knows nothing of love. She knows nothing of its holding power and nothing of how easy it can be to forsake it.)

But, she is here now. And this is her home. And it would be a mistake to say that she is not fond of it. It is all she has known—really known—and it is where her family, a small, disparate menagerie, lives and shares stories. Mauve grows restless from time to time, as she is made to do; she grows tired of the pessimism that spreads like wildfire in her mind, killing all the childish things it touches.

She runs. It is the only way she has ever learned to cope. 
She runs with Coyote winds, mischievous and furtive;
She runs with the Mother, who spares her no favorable wind or tide.

She considers leaving, of course, and mother would let her go because mother knows some things are unstoppable. Something—comfort? ease?—keeps her here, kicking up sand as she rings around the north side to stare across the wide ocean that separates them from another island, heaving, lathered with filmy sweat.

DON'T HOLD A GLASS OVER THE FLAME
DON'T LET YOUR HEART GROW COLD

PHOTOGRAPHY © RAY HENNESSY