River

I would rather hide and consider this cave to be our homeland than be an outsider everywhere.
 
The city streets are growing cold. And Muse remembers this feeling. It is etched into their joints like the waves inscribed on the wax cylinder of a phonograph. The playback buzzes in their frame, bringing with it the echo of cold nights spent against tree trunks, under bushes, curled into knotholes…
 
…the lake in Central Park is cold and clear. It draws them the way it did that first night, when Nita guided them back from the tavern they'd stumbled into. How could they have known, then? How could anyone have known?
 
Some lands stand strong as mountains
'til earthquakes do them in.
 
They move down to the edge of the water. They spend a great deal of time in this park, these days. There are always projects to focus on, and people to talk to, and pleasant distractions to drown in. But those distractions are not here. Not at the edge of the lake. Not where they can gaze into the scattered, shattered fragments of light that dance across its surface and imagine what their fractured brilliance might mean.
 
We have no country of origin.
 
A nest, they had said to Miranda. A place of safety. Of protection from the outside world. But the word had more meanings, in other tongues. A crèche was also a tableau. Figures frozen in time, in poses of worship, or of triumph - whatever best suited the one who had posed them.
 
All this time, Muse had been awake. All this time they had let themself be posed at the whim of those they'd believed in. The will of the people they'd loved and had failed to love them back had shaped every inch of the way they carried themself.
 
Even now, from the opposite side of the coin, were the rest all that different? Frozen in their tableaus of waiting, and longing, and fear, poised to flee at the next threat?
 
Some lands stand tall as forests
'til the felling axe begins.
 
Muse pushes one narrow, slender hand through the surface of the water. It flows around their fingers and settles into their joints, a cold shock to their warm system. Maybe they are too used to being warm. But who was it that had told them they didn't deserve warmth? Who was it still, that made so many believe warmth was beyond their grasp?
 
There is nowhere for us to go home to - and even if that was the lands we cling to in the songs of remembrance... those lands are gone now, too.
 
They spin their fingers beneath the water. It eddies under their hand, carrying a swirl of sediment and tiny fragments of water-plants with it. It had awed them, once - and in no small way, it still did. How, under the right conditions, one small, swift, confident movement could drag so much after it, whether it liked being dragged or not.
 
We are more strong than mountains,
more graceful than the maple.
 
One small, swift, confident movement.
 
Our power lies within.
 
Like whispers.
 
Like wishes.
 
Like magic.
 
We are a river.