when the Mighty Oak wains

Sometimes it's hard to imagine the sheer scale of the You that I once knew,
Before your world became so small and mine grew to be so big.

I remember it well, the vast expanse of your love.
The timeless, bottomless stories you wove around my head,
borne of threads collected from a thousand places and a thousand different hearts,
and sewn into mine like a beautiful, colourful reminder of my very own Origin Story.

But it was you, in all your vastness, who taught me to build cities
And continents
And oceans
And to fill lakes with my experiences
Let rivers flow with all my most joyous memories
To stack mountains up and cap them with starlit snowflakes of friendship and love and laughter
To add gold and silver threads
to my very own tapestry.

But then a sickness wrapped in aged bones
Came rolling in
Like a thick damp fog over a turquoise ocean
And put up his walls around you
And built his ramparts high into the skies
Closed the city gates against the plague of happiness and freedom
Drawing heavy, motheaten curtains across your horizons
So you could not see
The world you had created
And shown to me

And now I see the fairytales
Were wrong all along
Old Father Time is not a kindly wizened wizard
But a grotesque narcissist of a man
Rotund belly swollen with all the time he has stolen
The opportunities theived from your bowl
Leaving you to starve slowly in his shadow.

I was enveloped by your geography.
Before him and now and your new world order,
where all you talk about is Moira and the plums
and what time the antique market opens on Sunday.

Oh how we would mock monotony, with its routine
You used to loathe routine.
Now you are crippled by it,
incapable of seeing the world in any way other than self-inflicted monotony.

Oh mother, how I long for your infinity to return to you.