The Lady on the Bus

And here I am, sitting on the bus. I sit at the front, having to slide by a carriage to get to my seat. I sit idle; my stop is not for an hour. My iPod is the companion for the day, as it always is. And there she is, the lady on the bus. She climbs in through a doorway close to the back.


She stumbles her way over to me after ten minutes or so. I have a romantic view of things. She went, to me. That sounds nice.

It's peculiar. The way she sits down next to me is not a sit but a squat. It appears as though she is bracing herself for some kind of effort. I glance over at her, and now at the rest of the bus. It is crowded; it's the commute home. However, she doesn’t have to sit next to me. There are a few seats across the aisle. I look at my iPod, keeping secret my hope she makes conversation with me by outwardly hoping she doesn't. The lady on the bus has a pretty face.

It's a simple face. The clean contour is what gives it its beauty. The brain is not quite creative enough to invent the faces you meet in dreams; it borrows them from reality. Pleasant dreams favor the face of the lady on the bus. She wasn’t dreamlike, but dreams want to allude to her.

She squats right in front of the carriage, with a cellphone on her lap. She isn’t comfortable. She's placed herself with both legs to the right side of the carriage. The lady on the bus places a hand on my shoulder and says, “I'm sorry honey, this will take but a mo'.” I nod and smile.

Grabbing her left leg with both hands, she picks up dead weight. It is a bum leg. The leg's mass is but only appreciable; it's half the size of her right. She grunts sharply, I think, for the benefit of those looking on. Not for herself. I wonder if she has done this many times before, if the pains called for in this drill are expected. She drops the leg to the left of the carriage. Her phone falls out of her lap.

“Oh my goodness, I'm sorry,” she laughs. I pull myself out of my detached trance, just to see her frown. The laugh was not out of delight.

The lady on the bus struggles with herself for a minute, trying to get a handle of how she wants to go about picking up her cellphone. She bends to the right and she bends to the left. The carriage is antagonistic. Nobody offers her help. After a significant time she manages to pick up the phone. I didn’t see anybody offer their hand and I didn’t offer mine.

She brings the phone to her face. “Oh,” she moans. The battery and its guard have fallen off. The laborious process of manipulating useless gravity to pick miscellanea off the ground is well practiced by now, so there is no show for the people on the bus. She picked up the pieces in half the time it took for the first.

She is trying to put the battery back into the cellphone. She is fumbling and then there is more fumbling. I feel uncomfortable. I take my headphones off my ears, and say, “Would you like some help?” The lady on the bus leans on me, smiles, and whispers into my ear, “Oh, would you kindly?”

I take the phone from her and put it back together. As she is reaching her arm across to take it back, I notice her loose, leathery skin. I think of Glenda.

Glenda is from my mother's past; she is not from her future, and she certainly does not preside in the present. Gloria is a wonderful lady with a wife and a kid from a previous affair. She did some coke and heroin, “back in the day.” She has the same saggy, tough skin as the lady on the bus. They share a hearty laugh, one that gives the impression that they don't want to stop because something horrible is waiting on the other side.

The lady on the bus says to me, “Oh, thank you darlin'! Where do you come from?” I tell her Norwood, and now we are talking. She shows depth to the gregariousness that extends into humanity. She compliments the baby in the carriage directly, saying “you have a cute smile.”

She then adjusts her focus back onto the cellphone and mutters, “Oh man, this is quite the hassle. I just want to listen to my music, you know? None of my boyfriend's fucking rap bullshit.” I find myself sympathizing with her. Somehow, I do know. The invitation to “know” with her gets me.

She wires her headphones into the phone and then turns and smiles at me. A beautiful face, a modest smile, fowl breath. I smell alcohol.

She dances as much as she can, in her little space on the bus. She does not exhibit any kind of modesty or shame. She just dances and dances, mumbling the words to herself. Though she is not concerned with viewers, she is concerned with listeners. She does not sing loud enough to be heard. A man calls out to her from the back of the bus and comes forward.

He chooses a seat across the aisle. The captivity of the lady on the bus has been, in practical terms, invaded. He is wearing a Budweiser baseball cap, a wife beater t-shirt, and work jeans. He has blue eyes. The same blue eyes John Smith has.

John Smith was a lucky man who found himself an unlucky family which left him all the luckier. He was once also my uncle. He had a beautiful boy, Nick Foley, with my once aunt. As part of the deal, he became a facsimile of a father to my once cousin Henry. One evening he crept into Henry's room, slow and with care. He gently woke Nick up by whispering his name into his ear. “Henry, Henry. Wake up. John has something to tell you. If your mother ever leaves me, I'm taking Nick to New Hampshire and you are never going to see either of us again.” The man has the same blue eyes as Larry which refuses to steady because they are afraid of seeing.

The man says, “What the fuck you doing, walking around? Where in the fuck is your cane? And fucking-a, this tyke hittin' on you or something?” All the while, he is jabbing fingers at her face. Perhaps he means to scare her or perhaps he means to scare the people on the bus. I don’t think he knows his intent.

That night I went home and cried. This day I sit here and write. I don’t think there is a neat way to wrangle the emotional loose ends of my lady on the bus.

A Tall Tale

It was the time of sunshine recline, and two men drove into Sierra Leone.

“Santa Clause ain’t writing Christmas Cards no more,” the man with the hat said.  “That’s why.”  The man understood people, so he gave the fellow sitting next to him a quick glance to emphasize his words.  “You must understand that.”

That was how the man chose to break the silence.

“Must, as you should, and you should if you don’t.”  He crumpled his brow into a furrow.  The newfound slope found itself smoothly parallel to the rim of his ten gallon hat, an existence in cannon with the world.  The hat wasn’t a one-off thematic choice; the man had much too much intentionality running through his soul.  It went along with his whole western suit.  A callback to rodeos which the man was sure never existed.  He turned to the man without a hat, which ended up being a good thing; no hat had something to say.

“I got in this car because you asked me to.  I don’t see that it matters I understand why I did it or not.  I mean, you don’t expect a man to understand love for him to feel it; he just feels it.  What is love, anyways.  That was a statement not a question.”  He ended with a fidget.

“That’s quit the tenuous connection you got there between doing your job and love.  But listen here, young-blood.  I don’t have anything more complex than words, but I can perfectly relate to you what love is.  That’s something.  Isn’t it?  Like an inverse holism.  Individual words become stronger when they have a community to bounce off of.”

No hat was confused.  “People don’t actually talk like that.”

About two days before, Santa Clause decided he didn’t exist.  The certainty of the time and the certainty of the why are known to the best of human knowledge.  Santa Clause most certainly did not have much reason to believe in himself, and Santa Clause most certainly did not have a specific time of existentialism.  It could have been while brushing his teeth, when he is most careful not to look in the mirror only to see his torrent of face.  It could have been while watching a Christmas special, where his existence is contested by animated children on the behalf of smug Hollywood writers trying to find themselves through art.  It could have been while writing a Christmas card to Jiminy Cricket.  The only matter of the situation is that Marry-Ann Clause, his spouse of four super-generations, found him sitting on the edge of his bed the following morning, despondent.  His last Christmas card was his hand and it read, “I love you with the intensity the sun keeps its daily vigil, Marry-Ann.”

Mrs. Clause reacted the only way she knew.  She called “Hat and No Hat.”

Having found their destination, the man with the hat parked.  The men got out of the car and sat in a coffee shop.

“I’m a serious man.  Do you know what that means, son?  It means I take life seriously.”  The first of the two picked his hat off his head as he would a berry off a bush and placed it on the table.

“If I were the hero of some kind of fictionalized piece, this would be symbolic.  But I’m not, and it ain’t.”  After a pause so long the air in his lungs had its own time to consider what needed to be said, he finally spoke.  “It’s a similitude.”

Hat and No Hat was founded in the year twenty when the man with the hat woke up to a cry of a thousand thousand goats screaming in terror.  He lived on a goat farm, so that was pretty OK, except for the part where the thousand thousand goats were screaming in terror as compared to just being a thousand thousand goats.  He jumped up and sprinted right outside to see what the problem was.  He came upon a horrible lizard beast with seven mouths, each of which was acquired from the devil through seven trials that cost him seven of his eight lives.  As it turns out, that was how he earned the moniker “horrible.”  Our friend the man with the hat had come upon El Chupacabra.  The man asked the horrible lizard beast why he was eating his goats, and good ol’ Chupe, he said, “No me gusta el pollo,” and ran off into the night.  Realizing that he had a gift for talking to supernaturals, the man with the hat founded Hat, a not-for-profit organization with an explicit goal of learning about “things in the world that regular folk just don’t understand.”  About forty years later, he came upon no hat, and as they say, a watched pot never boils.

The man with the hat placed his hat back upon his head, stood up, and said, “We’re going to the beach.”  They went.

There was the sun, clouds, hot air, and Santa waiting for them there.  Santa Clause knew that people would come for him.  It wasn’t off-season.  He just didn’t know what would happen when somebody tried to touch him.  Santa didn’t move or speak when the pair reached him.  He just sat legs folded over another, hunched over with his torrent of face squished firmly against his hands.  The two men sat opposite Santa, to form a perfect triangle.  Santa faced exactly opposed to the ocean.

“I’m here, Santa, armed with nothing but words,” the man with the hat said, while making special care to wink at no hat.  However, Santa was having none of this.

“Everybody is in limbo.  This world is limbo.  It’s a place to punish those who lived nobly.  That is what happened to us, my dear chaps.  We lived nobly in a former life, and when we died, sinless, we were sent here.  Somehow I have ended up with a neat little duality to my penance.  I enjoy the special privilege of having exactly as many people speculating my existence as there are doubting it.  That cancels a man out, I think.  Do people go when they die again?  I’m not much concerned with the whereabouts of location three.  Just.  Just I’m not sure.  You, sir.  Touch me.”  Santa gestured at no hat.  No hat understood the importance of defining a philosophy system in pragmatic terms, so he reached out with one finger and went to poke Santa Clause right in the stomach.  He collapsed right into him.  There was an absence of an absence of hat; no hat fell wholly into him, body aligning with Santa’s as he fell.

The man with the hat stood up, took his hat off, and threw it alongside the curls and flows of the ocean wind, an existence concurrent with the world.

That Christmas, every single child in the world, independent of any binary alignment of belief in Santa, received a large mirror which didn’t work.

#11 A Love Story

There is a love story out there. It starts and ends with a girl and a boy. It’s a very grand, romantic love story, so let’s say that they didn’t know their parts in it yet. It is a story that owns many characters, each fulfilling their own benign, unique roles, unaware of what they were apart of. They are the same as you and me.

It’s a good love story, so it had a hook, a pillar which united them all. In this love story of ours, a Ferris wheel took on the role of fastening lives together. It is a monument.

But, there’s a twist. There isn’t a Ferris wheel. In the little town of Salisbury, there is not a Ferris wheel. Perhaps stranger than that, there was a Ferris wheel in Salisbury. It was a great deal.

People loved Salisbury. It was a novelty town, built right on the beach. People came from far and wide. They went to Joe’s Arcade Playland, they went to the fortune teller right on the corner of the circuit, they went to the open lot dedicated to one sole Ferris wheel. The little people, they went to Salisbury.

However, people stopped feeling that Salisbury verve. They no longer felt Salisbury was a part of them, and they a part of Salisbury. This is not a story of a conglomerate invading and pervading a small town, this is a love story. So it can be said family business failed not because of greedy nature, but of fickle nature. Time went on. A spirit is not corroded in one day.

The decay, of course, was gradual.

Gossip of the town had it that poor tide made summer homes disposable. Life and liberty allow the pursuit of happiness, but without an idle happiness, one does not have much use for liberty, nor does one witness life. One man bemoans his poor fishing season to their neighbor, the neighbor reevaluates their own relative prosperity as insufficient, and so the cycle becomes self-perpetuating. True discontent and complacency are mutually exclusive.

It would be dishonest to simplify it so, however. The bond between a man and his heart is complex. In this love story, one does not make the claim, “the fish are sparse,” and has done their job. There is more to be seen.

As Salisbury became more homely and less like home, the collective subconscious of those who had to live there during the good and the bad became self-aware. It was not of looking in a mirror and being cognizant of what is, it was absentmindedly chewing a pencil because it needed to be sharpened. The people who fully invested themselves in Salisbury, the resilient ones, passively adopted a pack mentality. If one were to make a value judgment on this hiving, one would also make a liar; hindsight ruins everything.

Vague, ambiguous generalizations do not inform the soul, so the love story has individuals as well. There is Kate, a Salisbury native; when you ask her what nationality she is, she answers, “Salisbyte.” She manages to rise above the humdrum of being just a local, though. Kate loves heights. She does not know this, though. She has never been higher than the top of the water tower, but even that is not much. Regardless, Kate is pretty sure that a height would be fun.

During a key moment in this love story, Kate stands in a large, abandoned parking lot for no other reason than to satisfy the linearity of life, though she thinks she is standing there to wait for her father to pick her up. She gets a suspicion that everything happens for a reason. Kate looks up and sees nothing. She knows this to be true.

Important events happen in threes, but an exception can be made when the second of two is especially important. A boy named Dan and his family move into Salisbury, right at the very moment of Kate’s revelation.

Dan is misty-eyed and mystified by what he sees, as he watches the town's exoskeleton shudder before him. The success and heartiness of life rots radially from the center of town. The town limits are defined by different kinds of borders; some are formal, and some are imaginary. The Now Entering sign is followed by an Out of Business banner, but that is only after several miles of one star motels and novelty shops. Dan reconciles his childhood dreams with reality. He had left childhood behind in his little cul-de-sac without realizing it. The final thing Dan notices before he makes the turn onto Chapel Street is a large, dilapidated parking lot.

The love story progresses at a slow pace, gathering its materials into the right spots for ready access, just as the computer readies itself during bootup. A computer takes seconds to do this; a love story takes years. The computer reaches its login screen; Kate and Dan meet.

“Hi I’m Kate and I love. What do you do?”

“I’m Dan. I suppose I just do.”

The initial spark is there; the computer mouse jitters to action as it decides what gateway is in want of exploration.

“Oh, well that’s neat, I guess. I don’t know really what to say to that. So, I’m not gunna say anything at all. Bye!” And so Kate ran off to the other side of the playground; the computer mouse lingers on the recycling bin to make sure it is empty, and satisfied, hovers on to the next task.

This love story is a digital alarm clock; it progresses at a linear pace, and contents itself on doing so. And if somebody comes along and interferes with its path, it is not aware, and is fine with whatever the outcome. Thus, it can be said that it is content with ignorance.

Dan has a relationship with his father, in so far as that a relationship is defined by its own existence. His bond with his father is not of note, nor is it negligible. It simply existed. In our love story, Dan’s father is the one who brings the Ferris wheel. The thought is not more important than the action, but it is important.

“Hey, Dan. Do you remember the Ferris wheel” - “in Stanley’s lot?” - “yeah that one. When you were a boy?”

Even though the alarm clock goes off earlier than anticipated, sometimes, it must be met with and received, no matter how ill the state of those who set it in motion; the Ferris wheel’s return was conceived much too soon. That night, Dan had a dream of construction and tragedy.

The love story that is out there, that is being dreamed of and experienced always, continues its course by seeing Dan and Kate have a chance meeting while walking down the strip.

“Hey, Kate? Do you remember a Ferris wheel being here?”

Love is a dialog of the heart finding itself in two separate bodies. The soliloquies in between are that which feed it, and the apostrophes are that which temper it. Dan and Kate build a Ferris wheel in the empty lot.

It is a fantastical goal, and they know it. They are building the Ferris wheel for the same reason Shakespeare wrote. They do not know what they would do if they didn’t, so they did.

The Ferris wheel was built from plywood and rocks and gears and various machinations that the couple were only just sure might work. It did not matter. If it succeeded, then Kate could find out if she liked heights or not, just to make absolute sure, and Dan would have the approval of his father. If it failed, they still had each other. And if nothing comes of it at all, stories of their feats will be passed on for many years, becoming so versatile as to teach any desired moral. In many, many, many generations, it would become known “as old as the English language itself,” as the word love is known now.

As it was made clear before, it shall be made lucid now. This is a good love story.

Once upon a time, there was a girl and a boy, Kate and Dan. They were content just to have each other around; they did not want anything more, or expect anything out of each other. They were sitting on carriage number four of their Ferris wheel, which was half built, and made entirely by their hands. It was such a sight to see, that it attracted people far and wide to little Salisbury. Salisbury was prospering, once again as it rightly should be, because of the ambitions of the girl and the boy. And they lived happily ever after.

Yet, once upon this time, in the day as it is right now, there is a girl and a boy, Kate and Dan. Dan did not feel valued or loved by Kate, and he asked too much of her. He fortified his insecurities in himself with his neediness and attachment to Kate. Kate genuinely loved Dan, but she did not know how to express it. Kate wanted to reciprocate in any way she could, but all she could do was treat him coldly. She did not mean to. It hurt her as much as it hurt him.

They were sitting in the second carriage of their complete hand-built Ferris wheel in the middle of a wholly abandoned parking lot.

They looked at each other, and they were not sure what they saw in the other’s eyes; did Kate see disgust; did Dan see pity? It does not matter. At least they had each other.

Kate looked out beyond the seat of the carriage. She did not see much else than desolation, except for the blue ocean a few hundred yards away. As she looked out to it, she heard Dan mumbling, “…this is like a love story…”

#10

A Mild Dream

I wonder why I yearned insinuation

When we were already weary

With all of your naivety

You could only cultivate brevity

We were never meant for longevity

You quietly appealed for sacrifice

Sacrifice is to make sacred

By letting go what is most revered

A desperate remedy to make whole once more

Intention without appreciable heart

Oft produces tension which pulls apart

You did not distinguish

What was sacrifice, and what was running away

I sacrificed

More than that

I became less selfish

I let go of you

#9

I do declare the situation to be a horrible mess. The problem is not that she was communicating with me again, which in and of itself has caused many a problems for me and my family, but of what she was actually saying to me. “My soul has an emptiness to it, as the ocean has its depths,” she says. I thought of it as perhaps ironic, coming from her. Maybe even clever, the sly rat. Of all the things she could speak out about, it would be the simmering of the soul. This was troubling me, being a man of appreciable rational. I know the nature and right societal places of some things, and a lady such as herself should not be having these kinds of problems. I sat down next to her containment cell.

“Listen sugar, I reckon something is wrong. That is fine; I can understand that. Every soul is its own cage - I can conceive of that within my ownself. But you cannot be doing this to me again, Miss Shelley Parkfield. I cannot handle you all by myself. I go around telling folks about this and that, they are going to think that I am off my rocker. I am not going down that road again with you, darlin’. Please, listen to what I am saying to you. Understand. Sympathize.”

In all of this babbling, she did not display the least amount of outward emotional investment in what I was saying. Her stoic nature unsettled. She just sat, staring, staring. Her big, obsidian eyes downright bore into a man’s soul. They alluded to a deep, archaic knowledge of things. I now figure that whatever was there before long made for greener pastures, leaving nothing but those placid husks in its place.

“Open the door,” she said, her voice neutral and even.

Her voice also carried soft tones to it.

Everything she said had a soft, airy feel to it. It was the voice of an android accented with honey. I reckon the nature of the allure came from some kind of psychological comfort thing. It harkened back to something long forgotten, if you’re catching on to what I mean. Maybe it was of your momma’s sweet little nothings being cooed into your little kid ears, as your world fell apart from around you for the fourth time since breakfast. Or more than that, perhaps it was just a promise of innocence lost, returned. Whatever it was, it had a deeply personal and profound affect. I am sure it was more perceived warmth of spirit than any kind of mysticism.

“You’re safe. It’s fine, I’m not how I used to be…how I used to be…back then. Back before the sour apple…” she stopped. Now, you must understand, this here pause of hers was not quite long enough for me to make note of it at the time, but it was long enough so that I now suspect that she was trying to regain her composure. “Sour apple rehabilitation. I am told that it has a ninety percent succ- oh yes, thank you. See? It’s fine. Relax.”

She began to approach me. Her gait was more of a cautious waddle than anything else. Her front was taking one step at a time, each step deliberate. Her rear was making due with its mechanical grace, each step stunted.

“Eat a pellet, make a pellet,” she sighed audibly, presumably for no other’s benefit than mine, as she maneuvered through her own waste. Piles of defecation. Crystallized urine. Nobody had bothered themselves enough to clean her cage in weeks. It was an evil thing to do. Seeing her like that broke my cold heart up like the sun breaks the night.

“Miss Shelley Parkfield, you are in quite the rut here. I do not know of matters of the heart, for I am but a southernly gentleman, but I do know of matters of cleanliness. If I may, Miss Shelley Parkfield, may I clean your cage?”

She did not feel so compelled to respond to me direct-like. Instead of articulating however she so felt on the issue, she did not say. She reached the front of the cage. The door was utterly open and useless as a defense, laying flat against the ground. I do say that I fidgeted a little, when she put her first paw on the threshold of cage and freedom. I did nothing. She put the other. I reckon that I should be ashamed of not moving to stop her, but shame only gets a man so far. When she had assured herself that her shenanigans were not facing any threat, she did about the damned nearest last thing I figured she would do. She stretched her torso out to a great length, and she began to sniff. I suppose that folk of her type have a higher predilection to appreciating inhalation than humans do.

By any rate, when she had her fill, she peered up at me. It was slow, but it was particular. She took her time. She had wanted to me to know just exactly she was up to at this point. I matched her look, not straying in the least. Her eyes had the same illustrious sheen they had, from all of those years ago. I did not know what to say. There she was, stretching about half of her mass into freedom (and supporting it all as well, mind you, she was a girl of considerable girth) well aware that she could break free at any time, but instead, all she did was look at me. I felt dizzy, like I was punched right in the head. I tried to speak, but suddenly I had cotton mouth. Opening my mouth and flexing my tongue here and there was unproductive.

Now, do not misunderstand me here. I want to get on even grounds - it’s my job as story teller to tell the tale whole, as it happened. It was not love, for I do not know what that is, but it was of the shock of seeing her eyes whole, for what they really are. Shelley and folks of her kind do not have pupils. I got down real close, and it was one solid mass. I have since learned from a preacher friend of mine that they aren’t blessed with the same plethora of color vision as man is. That is neither here nor there, but it helped me understand her world a little bit better. It helped me conceive of her worldview a bit more, if I may be so bold.

She peered into my eyes for just a few moments before retreating back wholly into the cage. Her gaze remained steady on mine. She held out for just a few more seconds before determining how exactly she was going to pursue conversation with me. She blinked, then began.

“My great aunt Mitzi-doma used to tell me tales. There were great tales, there were little tales, but they all held significance. It was tradition. It was telling stories that would inform our decisions later in life. Sometimes, what was being said didn’t matter as much as what was not being said. Other times, it was merely the togetherness that served a purpose. Purpose,” she blinked again. Before this encounter, I had not seen her blink once. In the time it took me to assimilate this into my cognitive perception, she had ruminated where to go next. It was the most indecisive I had ever seen her.

“Coprophagia. What purpose does this serve, eating our own defecation? I am told that it’s a resonance of times long gone. Mitzi-doma explained this as a way for us to remember our past. Years ago, we were a carnivorous tribe of people. We were feared, we were revered. We were at the top. We saw everything below us as dung, not worth anything. So we ate them, knowing that that was the ultimate gift conceivable. Not a token sacrifice, or any nature of agricultural offerings, but their bodies’ itself.

Over time, our food supply dwindled. Hamsters were our favorite, and for unspecified political reasons, they migrated south. We were soon left with either the undesirable gerbil to feed on, or starve. My kind are a versatile people. We can understand when the climate has changed, when the game has changed. We adapted. We became vegans, for what essentially came down to PR reasons. It was a complex situation with a beautifully simple solution. The hamsters would only return upon being respected and treated as equals. That way, we could work together for a new future. We needed their horticultural technology, for all we had were weapons of war. To this day, we eat our own poop to remember the horrors and injustices we inflicted on our hamster friends in the past.”

I now understood. My guinea pig wanted me to return the hamster to Petco. The crazy fucker.

Guest Writer

Written by Kim Lester

              I walked in utter comfort, my skin absorbing the unknown world around me. The sunlight was my guide; streams of light slipped through the treetops and illuminated the woods. I was not afraid. I felt safe, perfectly safe - I felt as though I were home.

              The leaves shimmered, the nearby brook sparkled. I passed by in awe, drinking in my surroundings, wishing that I could melt among it, become one with my Olympus. I felt unnatural. I did not belong. And yet this place had embraced me, and I could do nothing more than return the favor. My legs glided smoothly on beneath me, but it felt as though they were not a part of me. I was absorbed in absolute beauty.

              I left the gravel path I'd been following and turned abruptly toward another, overgrown pathway. The boughs of trees so close by enticed me further. In seconds, I was standing in the middle of a dirt path, gawking at a fallen tree a mere foot in front of me. In my mind I saw it fall. It was a stormy night, the winds were wild and unavoidable - they tore the tree apart with a crack and pushed it to its final resting place. It had landed in such a way that forced it to straddle another, smaller tree; it sloped upward, giving me the image of a cliff rising to meet the heavens. I clumsily hoisted myself onto the trunk and walked forward, my arms sticking straight out for balance. I watched my feet carefully as the fear within me began to grow. And suddenly I slipped, taking a sharp breath of terror - but I was safe, I assured myself. I was alright. I continued on, every step more cautious than the last. The second half of the tree was covered in holes. These holes were so perfect that it seemed as if someone had drilled through the bark over and over again. I knew better; my immediate thought was of a swarm of killer insects that would surely rise to attack me - thus forcing me to lose my balance and fall to my untimely death. Perhaps it was a bit dramatic; nevertheless, I did not make it to the edge of the tree. I heeded my own foolish warnings and hurried back down the trunk, hopping down to safety.

              I pressed on, ducking beneath wild brush and coming upon an open area dotted with trees that extended high into the sky. I pivoted, trying to decide what direction to take next; I saw a pathway glowing in the sunshine, and promptly headed toward it. In seconds I had come upon a luscious green field, the kind my mother had always taught me to avoid as a child. And so I did the sensible thing: I ran on through it. I became the child who only dreamed of adventure; I became the little girl who ran with life painted upon her flushed cheeks, the girl who created worlds in her mind that offered her escape. I had successfully found an escape that was true, that was real, and I stared at everything with a childlike sense of wonder.

              There in the field I stopped and stood still. I listened to the buzzing of unseen insects that surely filled the brush around me; they seemed to chirp and buzz in harmony, creating a constant working machine. My eyes caught hold of a glint of red among the green, and suddenly I was locking eyes with a red dragonfly. Its wings fluttered weakly as a breeze passed over the land; I attempted to reach for it, but it rose at once and suspended itself midair, as if to tempt me - and then zipped on by, disappearing. I smiled and took a long, hearty breath, attempting to fill my lungs with this beauty. An arousing scent snuck its way up my nostrils, tingling my nose; it was the scent of something pure and beautiful - something genuine, promising. I turned to follow the scent and soon came upon a small pond. It looked as though it had gone untouched by human hands for some time; it was surrounded by a ring of trees and wild plants, and I gently pushed my way through until I was standing at the edge of the water, looking out upon a silver surface covered in lillypads. Sunlight darted across the surface, giving me the impression of sparks; I felt that if I simply reached out and touched the water, warmth would fill me. But I did not want to taint it, I did not want to watch the water ripple in response to the arrival of my foreign touch. It was too serene, too perfect. I turned back.

              Now I began the trek back to my starting point, for the sake of my mother and nephew, who were likely brimming with impatience; much longer and they might've come to search for me. I followed the same pathway back, and inevitably came back upon the fallen tree. Again it called my name. This time, I did not think. I did not let fear be my dictator. I took a breath and jumped up, pulling the rest of my body onto the stump of the tree. I stood tall and stumbled forward.

              I had arrived at my destination; I was standing atop the very edge of this unlucky tree, on an even level with the brush before me. I had grown closer to the sky. I could feel the wind on my lips. I looked out and up and watched the treetops sway in the wind. As if they were breathing. As if they were feeling. The wind swirled through the woods with a softness, and it befell me so sweetly that I sighed. I imagined the air holding me, tossing my soul out into nature to dwell among the beauty.

              In another moment I found myself sitting at the edge of the small brook I'd paid so little attention to upon my arrival. It glistened brightly, as if to emulate the night stars. I closed my eyes and swallowed the life in the air - the air that felt so free. It had released itself among truth, among nature; it was not restrained by congested buildings or crowds of people - it was unbound and alive. I opened my eyes and rose slowly, peeling myself off of the ground.

              I walked back quietly, making each step as soft as possible, as if to say, rather apologetically, that I did not mean to intrude. Before leaving, I turned back. It was overwhelming. I felt that I was missing so much, that there was so much that I had not yet seen; I felt that my eyes were not open wide enough, and that I had only glimpsed a piece of truth. I savored every bit of what I had seen, what I had been welcomed into - and yet I found myself yearning for more. It felt, in a strange sense, as if my soul was reaching back, begging to remain for just a little while longer.

              I watched the trees sway in the breeze, conceding to the winds and accepting their guidance with a meekness I envied. Was this a mirror of what our lives were meant to be? I opened my mouth and tasted the water; I felt the winds sweeping over me, carrying me. They were whispering. I could not make out the words, but one word rang in my mind - Always. The stretch of it, the simplicity, the promise it contained - the word itself suited the wind’s whisper, echoed it. I listened to the birds singing unknown songs back and forth, to the machine-like buzz that filled this new home, and I said my goodbyes.

              I had released myself into the woods, and found a peace that engulfed me. I was free, I was part of something I did not understand, but this fact alone felt oddly reassuring. And I had heard the voice of the wind. I still felt the word sparking like an ember upon my lips: Always.

#8.5

    Who I am is not a result of a special versatility of character, but of a survival methodology.  When I’m around my friends, I’m a goofball.  I feel obligated to indulge in as many sidetracks of humor as possible, if only to stave off the looming threat of worthwhile conversation.  To some people, I’m known as the kid with all of the pedophile jokes.  To others, I’m known as the guy who has something to say to them only every few months, perhaps all this may be is a sly recognition of this peculiar relationship.  To most adults I am solemn, careful, and considerate.  None of them right.  I am not static.  To speak in generalities, I assume different mannerisms and behaviors around different people.  Although I do have a strong sense of self, I find it difficult to not fall into a persona when interacting with differing expectations.  It is easier to meet expectations and act accordingly then be who I perceive myself to be.  It is comforting for both me and the people I interact with for me to be a static, flat character.
    With all of these strange, contradicting senses of self, I wonder if I am any of them or all of them.  I do have a strong idea of who I would like to be, and who I fancy myself to be, but considering how easily I swap personality traits, maybe I am none of them.  I suspect that there is no value in trying to sum myself up to one being.  It is an interesting exercise in futility.
    I think I understand the dynamics of my adapting to ever changing parameters in expectations and intellectual environments.  I was deemed to be middle aged by the age of eleven.  At the time, I was floundering to attach myself to something, anything, if it meant that I could have meaningful interactions with kids my age.  I couldn’t engage in the kind of conversation that I wanted to, so I took the easiest route to acceptance.  I did not try to fit in, as many kids my age did, but I tried to be as “out there” as I could be.  I made ritualistic cat sacrifice jokes.  I watched South Park, in the hopes that I could learn a new dirty word to share with my friends.  I could have an air of pretension when I needed to, so when it came down to it, I could talk with authority on things that I had little comprehension of.  It eventually became more than method acting, and it became who I was.  I tucked away who I wanted to be into a little corner of my soul, hoping that some day it would be able to shine.  It wasn’t until high school that I was able to drop the condescension, and start to let leak who I felt as though I deserved to be.