I feel it sometimes- the spirit of the wanderer.
It pulls the cloak of the wind around my heart and tickles him with rustling leaves.
"C o m e," said with a voice like a brook at midnight, chill, clear, pushing through other sounds to still them.
The trees outside my window are dancing, wondering why their boughs do not make the sound of violins as they rub together. They imagine a tune in a minor key, sad, very sad, but it is not their song. It is the song of the spirit of the wanderer, not sad in heart but sad to be melodramatic as it goes, calling those called first to it.
The spirit of the wanderer looks like an autumn leaf, dying but not dead. I do not know why, for it feels like the promise of life. The spirit is what makes the nights grow cold, for it cannot stand to be under the blazing sun. The blazing sun has power to make the wanderer shrivel and die under its glaring eye, but the warm summer nights invite him to move through the woods, hushed, taking in what he can and leaving the rest for another night, another flight.
In fancy, my heart leaves its chest a thousand times to join the spirit. He follows through dells and caves and into holes in the ground where he spends his nights without me. He lives in trees to keep away from danger and he drips my blood onto the ground in strange foreign lands for me to find again someday.
And then I turn over, I am asleep. The spirit of the wanderer still knocks on my window pane, still my heart yearns to follow, but I cannot tell. I am asleep, but I feel it sometimes.
