13: Spirit
I stare at the blackboard- littered with hastily scrawled numbers and partially erased equations. I am lulled by the lines of my notebook paper and by the voice speaking, what seems to me, utter nonsense.
Suddenly, I am falling. Not physically- I still sit slouched in my desk, curls in face- but mentally. It is not a free fall (though it feels as overwhelming), but rather a controlled descent.
Passing clouds on my way down, I can extend a hand and touch them like I wanted to do that time when I was five years old and riding on an airplane (not for the first time, but for the first time I could remember). There is no glass baring my fingers and in this place it feels as I imagined it would when I was five, not as I know it would at eighteen- marshmallow clouds, light and fluffy, instead of cold and wet.
The cold and wet is the ocean breaking my fall. The impact is gentle and my feet rest a moment on the calm waters, strange illuminations drift up from the depths. Dropping to my knees, I press my face into the ripples I’ve created and peer at the scene beneath me.
It is a forest- tall trees, babbling brooks, and I can see now that the strange illuminations are actually the last golden hints of sunlight. With all of my soul I want to be there. I want to sit on that warm rock and pull a paperback from my bag. I want it, but just as my face begins to sink through the ocean’s skin there is a loud shriek. The water splashing upward as a violent gust swoops overhead and I am dragged backwards, fingers clawing at weightless nothing.
Out of the water and up through the marshmallow clouds and back out of myself, sitting there with a curl wrapped around a finger, pen lax in my grip. The notebook on the desk has lines of nonsense scribbled in my messiest handwriting (which is still nearly perfect). I close it, gather my belongings, and stand- rubbing at the ache in my chest.
So close.