A Familiar Rest

When the person who has stripped me bare has finished their examination, they turn to the next step. They have stripped me fully now, after all, peeled off everything that is me and found an understanding of who I am. Now they are going to show me who I can become.

They push the clay that was my old body aside and they pull out a new batch. Skilled is their hand as they set me aside on their workbench and they warm the clay, blinking slow as they contemplate first steps.

I am built up by them piece by piece. Pinch by pinch they take of the source and they press onto the armature of my spirit. The clay of my new body is warm from their fingers and it clings to me, easily building first the bare and formless shape of any person and then, in time, the person I am to become.

When there is enough on me they stop pushing more in, they start to work with what they have.

I'd always thought that sculptors used tools, but this sculptor needs only their hand to shape me. They move over my body with the same practiced ease that they showed when they stripped me bare. They pull on my limbs, on my torso, on my abdomen. They shape me in gentle curves and swells.

The movement becomes almost rhythmic and undoubtedly soothing. They are shifting the clay of my body and shaping the outside of me and if I had movement I might be breathing slow and feeling the heavy weight of my eyelids.

I am relaxed by it, comforted by it. I let them shape me with an understanding that even with their hands forming me they are not making any conscious choices.

Art, be it in clay or stone or paints or writing, is so often about following the natural curves. There is an anecdote that sculptors would stare at a block of wood or marble for ages trying to see what it is the block wants to be, because it is the block that decides and the artist is but the executor of its will.

I feel that here. The sculptor who is making my body right now is the agent of my manifestation. They are making me who I want to be, who I need to be, and maybe who I should have been all along.

Shoulders slim and hips generous. Waist small and legs and thighs tapered. Arms and fingers gentle from the swell. Chest soft, but not in a way that is familiar to me.

None of this is familiar to me and none of it is what I was. None of it is what I have ever been, and maybe that is exactly what I need.

They make me soft, gentle and sweet. They make me supple and they make me bend instead of break. They make me like unto a tree.

Because a tree can stand up to the buffeting of a windstorm in a way that a rigid structure never could. A tree does not need to be taught to bend with the wind because it is in their very nature to do so. And so no matter the ferocity of the wind the result is always the same. The tree is unaffected by the storm.

Most times at least. At least more times than a wall.

I have never had it in me to bend and shift with the current and the tide. I've never had that capacity but I've felt it in my heart even though I didn't bear it in my flesh. This new form though, this shape that their hands are making me, it seems like it just might give me my fondest wish.

A new chance. A second chance. A chance to bend before the coming storm.

My face is the last of me to be formed. They pull me close, their hands somehow shrinking from large enough to hold me to small enough to work the tiniest of details. They trace the gentle curves of my cheeks and form the roundness of my face. They push into my eyes, forming them broad and open and inviting. They pluck at my nose, pulling it into an upturn at the end. They push at my lips, making them purse.

And then they close my eyes. I am finished now. I am set down and bent into a seated position, knees pulled up to my chest and shifted slightly to the right as my face presses against something cool.

I feel the world come into form around me, the seat forming under and behind me and scooping me up and holding me. I feel the gentle rocking, the subtle rhythm of movement. I hear the shuffle of people and the sound of an engine rumbling through the space.

I feel the world around me that I've felt before, but I'm content to stay in my cocoon a little bit longer. After all I've been gestating for so long, a butterfly ready to be born. One more moment won't hurt.

For a limited time you can join my Patreon for only $2 and get access to over a month's worth of new pages of My Second Chance as well as SEVEN FULL STORIES with a new one every month! Join here: https://www.patreon.com/SophiePert