The dust billowed towards you.

Your dark lashes were clumped with ash. Eyes closed, you faced mosaic darkness; your eyelids became flimsy, fluttering moths. Jagged pebbles crept into your shoes and bit your bare heels while sagebrush kissed your bony ankles.

The wind traced the valleys of your ears. The wind told you secrets.

Your bones rattled as seagulls screeched – on the horizon, the ocean laced rage into each wave. You trembled. Salty sweat slipped through your clumped fists.

Around you spun a spool of occurrences: dandelions brushed your cheeks, straw-like weeds crackled, mice scampered, June bugs whirred. Untamed vegetation hid cobwebs and caterpillars, spiders and sunken dreams.

As the forces took their course, realization trickled into your veins: the Human Heart desires, craves, ravages, envies. The Human Heart aches to dominate. You had left the confines of your plastered four walls to seek control, to find another home where you could summon security.

But there was no soul to conquer.

Each plant, each rock, each ambling animal; each wave, each gust of wind, was born to fulfill its role. You could not compact the bodies of Earth’s creatures into one, pliable entity. Your palms sought to crush and devour, so you shredded leaves and hurled rocks and trampled the cracked ground; you screamed “mine” and felt it in your blood, felt it jump on the tip of your throbbing tongue.

Yet all things you crumbled still lived; they lived in an altered form, but lived – complete annihilation was futile. Your eyes lost their savage glow. Your primordial urges dimmed, and you lay amidst earthly and unbridled manifestations. A twisted shard of nature, you could only sit by and watch the show of the Fluctuating Universe.

Something in you flickered as the sun, bleeding burnt orange, fell prey to dusk once again.