A story was tossed upon me, its torso heavy and breathing.
You fell upon me in a drunken rush.
Perhaps it was meant to be disguised as accident, much like a tree shyly making its descent, and with every intention of landing upon the most innocent or malleable patch of grass in order to cover its blades, all purposeful mistake and clumsy targeting. And I felt the swell of reluctance that hummed with messages of better judgment, heard the alarms of not cutting through pointlessly set dedication or singularity, but then I focused on the warm, watery weight that sloshed around the walls of my thoughts, the distance of reason and how I welcomed that chaos, the inevitability placed on selfish events such as those forthcoming. And so, really, a story was tossed upon me, its torso heavy and breathing, its heart beating with action and not sentimentality, and I caught it. This story danced in midair from its fall into existence, was knocked a time or two by my unsure hands, and yet I eventually gave stillness to its movement. And there, by my own hands, we created minutes of paragraphs, the occasional bump of commas, all until you were shaken by an ending, a period, and I exhausted into a semicolon, though not wanting or anticipating a following clause except for closure.
My sentence was left undone, and yours shut, and thusly my eyes shut and my clothes were undone.
I followed the hallway to sleep to avoid an aftermath of second-guessing meaning. Morning came, and once you knew where you were, what prologue to nothingness you had helped create, you stole away and retreated to a bed that suited your desire for more room in a slumbering position. I turned my back, my cold feet kicking my discarded pants, and sifted through shadows of what happened, what I would have preferred, and all the echoing cackles of disappointment.
Things start simply, because I would like for them to just remain as such. In the beginning, I want to feel attractively daring, indifferent, so lost from my normal helpings of beckoning genuineness that I cannot help but welcome something I only half-way expected. I want to feel distant from the meaning I make myself an apprentice to, more a child of discovery, something close to beautifully tumultuous, a person of chance or creation as opposed to a stale sidekick of planning. In the end, however, I am left shaking with the thought of solid, unretractable vacancy.
I pretend that I am settled with the idea: that we used one another with parallel knowledge of it, that there was some layer of rebellious ungoodness that part of me truly wants to obtain, that not every piece of skin requires reservation. Waking up this morning, though, revealed to me the true face of the product of our recklessness.
I walked to a rather fascinating, isolated, and expansive field of my college's last evening, its name being Dogwood, with two friends. We found it deserted, as I would have expected it to be due to the icy air and time of night. There I trailed after their naturally quicker footsteps. The wind poured down the hills and slammed its temperature fiercely. At one point, they had drawn ahead together a good distance, and I was hesitant to call to them but did. They kept going and were too far ahead to hear me. Enter one of the most chilling emotions I ever see within myself: a distinct wave of being forgotten and all its neighboring sensations of being alone. From this, though, I usually construct a personal retaliation, in which I firmly conjure a false mask of independence and convince my perception of truly wanting or achieving it.
So I turned my back upon them and stood in place. The layers of grass, usually tall and difficult to pass, had lain down and fallen asleep with blankets of ice. Their tops shimmered like a thousand mounds of a giant fairy's frozen hair, pieces clumped and sorted like frigid, disobedient curls, like this magical creature had taken one step too far into another climate after bathing in another and found herself captured by a shocking cold.
The moon was particularly fascinating, as its light was bright enough to convince me I was closer to it there than any place I'd yet wandered in. Its face was cut with the black branches of trees and the occasional spackle of cloud and therefore presented a haunting illumination. I could see down the belly of the hills, how far and up it went, or what direction was carved. I could hear nothing but the wind that wrapped me up, now more like a soothing reminder of nature's movement than an irritation to fight.
I had a few moments of building solitude, my friends' voices laughing and joyous farther off, and I was saying to myself how that--my posture, my detachment, the dark yet light surrounding, the tight formation of my mouth, the overwhelming entrapment--was to be my fate. That I was destined to meet an end that kept on going in its droning rhythm for years, that I would eventually see the face of my own self-worth and be cast down into this irreversible melancholy. I felt it so powerfully that I hadn't heard the footsteps at my back and had been immersed in mentally climbing the steps to crying, until it was broken with a voice. I had been drowning in a sort of fascination with that vision of emptiness, had been so caught up in the beauty of all that I could see--from the veil of the sky to the slow, aching glow of a pair of headlights that I felt were so untouchably far from my present position--that I had truly escaped reality.
Earlier that evening, I had gone to a restaurant downtown to see an all female bluegrass group. One I am very fond of, for they are alumni of my school and what music I have of theirs always made me think so vividly of memorable things in my months away: all things that spoke of mountains, light spring nights, or any other moment of that last month of freshman year that feels very much like renewed intrigue each time I experience it. I secured a table right in front of the stage. And at some point, I could've sworn I could see something very rare and familiar reflected on the light on one of their noses, or witness a hidden emotion of mine with the movement of fingers on a flute, or hear words that tumbled hard into my stomach. One lyric, I believe, claimed a statement like "Curl up in the womb of your journal," and I was very taken with it for the remainder of the night.
I feel triumph after a night such as that, sitting silent with multiple people in the car, giggling first about the cold weather until we get to that silence, then looking out the window at the typical orange glow of any light but knowing that I'm noticing the glow in a different way in that moment, past regular observation, feeling as though I've conquered some percentage of adventure or simply tasted something so naturally or innocently beautiful that I feel, eventually, as though I have evolved and lived for the better.
Perhaps it was meant to be disguised as accident, much like a tree shyly making its descent, and with every intention of landing upon the most innocent or malleable patch of grass in order to cover its blades, all purposeful mistake and clumsy targeting. And I felt the swell of reluctance that hummed with messages of better judgment, heard the alarms of not cutting through pointlessly set dedication or singularity, but then I focused on the warm, watery weight that sloshed around the walls of my thoughts, the distance of reason and how I welcomed that chaos, the inevitability placed on selfish events such as those forthcoming. And so, really, a story was tossed upon me, its torso heavy and breathing, its heart beating with action and not sentimentality, and I caught it. This story danced in midair from its fall into existence, was knocked a time or two by my unsure hands, and yet I eventually gave stillness to its movement. And there, by my own hands, we created minutes of paragraphs, the occasional bump of commas, all until you were shaken by an ending, a period, and I exhausted into a semicolon, though not wanting or anticipating a following clause except for closure.
My sentence was left undone, and yours shut, and thusly my eyes shut and my clothes were undone.
I followed the hallway to sleep to avoid an aftermath of second-guessing meaning. Morning came, and once you knew where you were, what prologue to nothingness you had helped create, you stole away and retreated to a bed that suited your desire for more room in a slumbering position. I turned my back, my cold feet kicking my discarded pants, and sifted through shadows of what happened, what I would have preferred, and all the echoing cackles of disappointment.
Things start simply, because I would like for them to just remain as such. In the beginning, I want to feel attractively daring, indifferent, so lost from my normal helpings of beckoning genuineness that I cannot help but welcome something I only half-way expected. I want to feel distant from the meaning I make myself an apprentice to, more a child of discovery, something close to beautifully tumultuous, a person of chance or creation as opposed to a stale sidekick of planning. In the end, however, I am left shaking with the thought of solid, unretractable vacancy.
I pretend that I am settled with the idea: that we used one another with parallel knowledge of it, that there was some layer of rebellious ungoodness that part of me truly wants to obtain, that not every piece of skin requires reservation. Waking up this morning, though, revealed to me the true face of the product of our recklessness.
I walked to a rather fascinating, isolated, and expansive field of my college's last evening, its name being Dogwood, with two friends. We found it deserted, as I would have expected it to be due to the icy air and time of night. There I trailed after their naturally quicker footsteps. The wind poured down the hills and slammed its temperature fiercely. At one point, they had drawn ahead together a good distance, and I was hesitant to call to them but did. They kept going and were too far ahead to hear me. Enter one of the most chilling emotions I ever see within myself: a distinct wave of being forgotten and all its neighboring sensations of being alone. From this, though, I usually construct a personal retaliation, in which I firmly conjure a false mask of independence and convince my perception of truly wanting or achieving it.
So I turned my back upon them and stood in place. The layers of grass, usually tall and difficult to pass, had lain down and fallen asleep with blankets of ice. Their tops shimmered like a thousand mounds of a giant fairy's frozen hair, pieces clumped and sorted like frigid, disobedient curls, like this magical creature had taken one step too far into another climate after bathing in another and found herself captured by a shocking cold.
The moon was particularly fascinating, as its light was bright enough to convince me I was closer to it there than any place I'd yet wandered in. Its face was cut with the black branches of trees and the occasional spackle of cloud and therefore presented a haunting illumination. I could see down the belly of the hills, how far and up it went, or what direction was carved. I could hear nothing but the wind that wrapped me up, now more like a soothing reminder of nature's movement than an irritation to fight.
I had a few moments of building solitude, my friends' voices laughing and joyous farther off, and I was saying to myself how that--my posture, my detachment, the dark yet light surrounding, the tight formation of my mouth, the overwhelming entrapment--was to be my fate. That I was destined to meet an end that kept on going in its droning rhythm for years, that I would eventually see the face of my own self-worth and be cast down into this irreversible melancholy. I felt it so powerfully that I hadn't heard the footsteps at my back and had been immersed in mentally climbing the steps to crying, until it was broken with a voice. I had been drowning in a sort of fascination with that vision of emptiness, had been so caught up in the beauty of all that I could see--from the veil of the sky to the slow, aching glow of a pair of headlights that I felt were so untouchably far from my present position--that I had truly escaped reality.
Earlier that evening, I had gone to a restaurant downtown to see an all female bluegrass group. One I am very fond of, for they are alumni of my school and what music I have of theirs always made me think so vividly of memorable things in my months away: all things that spoke of mountains, light spring nights, or any other moment of that last month of freshman year that feels very much like renewed intrigue each time I experience it. I secured a table right in front of the stage. And at some point, I could've sworn I could see something very rare and familiar reflected on the light on one of their noses, or witness a hidden emotion of mine with the movement of fingers on a flute, or hear words that tumbled hard into my stomach. One lyric, I believe, claimed a statement like "Curl up in the womb of your journal," and I was very taken with it for the remainder of the night.
I feel triumph after a night such as that, sitting silent with multiple people in the car, giggling first about the cold weather until we get to that silence, then looking out the window at the typical orange glow of any light but knowing that I'm noticing the glow in a different way in that moment, past regular observation, feeling as though I've conquered some percentage of adventure or simply tasted something so naturally or innocently beautiful that I feel, eventually, as though I have evolved and lived for the better.