The Chocolate Box - Simone Crowther

I wake up and there is a jewelled box at the end of my bed. The jewels glisten in sea colours of violet, blue, green and acquamarine; eels and fish entwine in the silver work. I open the box and therein incongruously lay chocolates!

Rich dark chocolates, milk chocolate, chocolate truffles, nut encrusted chocolates and white chocolates. I puck a white chocolate and memories swirl before me, memories that form the core of me. I find myself in a tiny airless attic with a trunk in front of me. I know of this trunk from the enchantress as the trunk of wonderment.

I open it and there at the bottom is a faded photograph of myself as a frail, pale girl, almost albino in my lack of colour with a voluminous mass of white blond hair that made me look like a mop on a stick. Such a miserable girl bowed beneath the hatred of a Poe-faced family. I remember her sadly. She was the sacrifice, I made to survive. I laid her in a chest, a stout wooden box, the size of a child's coffin and hid her (in the cave of an old formidable she-bear who takes in all such orphans) in a netherworld of my own depths because she was sick beyond my healing. She lies there still, swathed in a few precious scraps of sun shot nature, dreams and hidden ambitions, waiting... So wan, pale and sick almost to death but lo' she breathes, so precious!

I have been digging for that soul, to wake it up, revive it, breathe life energy back into it. I lay a honey comb as good will for the bear. A token of my recognition of the sweetness of life, my love and commitment. I take her childish form from the bear.

I call to her, coax her with soft words. It is safe to come out and be loved, joined with my body, joined with the present. It is safe to breathe deeply, to laugh, to dare, to dance wildly. It is safe to weep for old pain and dissolve old wounds.

I place her sleeping form over my shoulder and dig my way back up to the daylight world.

She is a splinter of my soul, a long forgotten part of me that had to lie hidden from the searching claws of my family.

She is a precious, precious thing. A part of me that wasn't safe to express. She is the forbidden, the wild, the magick and also the vulnerable flame of youth, of life lived passionately. She is white like the moon and her fragility is deceptive for she holds tremendous power. She is my Persephone, my playful, puckish spirit that had to lie in the underworld but now returns to be my soul's delight.

She lay like a spiritual seed and now she can grow like an immense silver-hot tree that casts both light and shadow.

I have let the moon out from my box. She is both the daughter and the mother of me.

She rests now, breathing deeply, rapidly gaining strength.

She is hungry and I feed her little scraps of meet. This is no vegetarian soul but a huntress with wolf's tail, canine teeth and claws.