Metamorphoses

Gabriela Bittencourt

It’s 6:30 am, a rose sits next to a window surrounded by fallen petals and glinting mist, smoke from a divine battle. Everyday after she woke she’d release her sweet-scent drawing all sorts of creatures to her. Birds would come, bees would come, people would come. 

Even the sun, who tries to give light equally to each corner of the world, came and would drag the day out just to be with her a while longer. She had a love affair with this world; it was open. She would sit with all and feel with all, and of all things she felt love, drum, and magic. 

This carnaval was coming to a close soon, she knew this. What she couldn’t grasp is why our beautiful world was full of inconsistencies within itself? Like how the sensation of death is what truly wakes us, how sometimes we laugh when we really mean to cry, or how the more profound you think, or dream, inspires dread. She could see the entrails of this world, and it was bloody and beautiful. 

She’d kvetch to the moon about the disturbia in her. “You shouldn’t take this world too seriously. The more you consider things, the more ironic they’ll show you to be. It’ll make you mad,” replied the moon, “the world has lit a match and set it on itself. No one knows why.” Could she sit with a world on a path toward obliteration? Burn with where she loved and where everything she loved loved. 

The moon left her to her own devices; she sat there feeling like a blasted tree unaware that Cupid overheard their discussion, and was moved by her immense pain and beauty. She was the one, he thought. He set his bow aside, picked up the berimbau, and began to play. In the next circle, she arrives as a bossa nova musician.