Wandering the streets, I paused to ask a bystander a question. It must have been a stupid one, because I was turned away feeling ridiculed.
I don’t belong here, I realized – I don’t belong here, because it’s a dream.
If I am the dreamer, why am I out of place?
Somehow, the world that I’ve fashioned for myself does not welcome me.
It feels wrong to stay at the lake for five days and not five thousand,
during which the water and the landscape and people it shapes could claim me for their own
and I’d grow used to it all, maybe.
The flitting swallows and wood fire at twilight puzzle me, like an embrace that makes you feel guilty for leaving (or ever coming at all).
I leave while the embers still glow under low, wind-tossed flames that leave the scent of smoke in my hair.
I found a beetle in the boat, laying flat on his back, wiggling his meaty, spindly legs in the air, trying to grasp something – anything – to right his shiny, swollen body.
Slowly, he stopped straining and scrambling on the carpeted floor of the docked pontoon and just lay there, little feet in the air.
He reminded me of myself when I try Pilates.
Pathetic,
I thought, sympathetically.
It is a cloudless and windless night in winter. Stepping out from under the roof, I walk across the asphalt and into the dark.
Crunching across the ice-glazed driveway, it hits me: the moaning roar of the highway that echoes across the quieted, bared suburbs and frozen landscape.
The sound grows louder for a few moments, and washes over me a wave of timidity. I realize that it is the first time today that I am not enclosed by walls; the only solid thing near me is the ground that I stand on.
I look in the opposite direction of it, and both up and down vanish – the immensity of the sky and the distance of the lights that dapple it make the smallness (but not insignificance) of such concepts clear.
My eyes search for the familiar; I find Orion and, surprising myself, recognize the Pleiades. Do they acknowledge me, and name me, too? I’m not sure if I even want them to. It would depend on the nature of their characters, wouldn’t it?
Though they are so far, it still matters to me.
Draw me out, with brittle charcoal and whittled pencil
Onto whatever surface you can find.
After all, don’t I look better on paper
Than under those merciless rays that overwhelm the outdoors?
Where the external is viewed in however many angles,
And the reflected light is equal parts piercing and protective?
Here, my veins aren’t visible; you don’t see a single pimple or stray strand
Or even what the outline of my face looks like.
Here, in a line or two, the internal is traced, a strand of genotype that was never expressed.
Right, left, right, left, right, and then left again;
Though a dimension is lacking, it is almost easier to get lost.
I think that the trees are happy in autumn. Their heavy cloaks are cast off, and their lanky, springy arms stretch a little higher than before. Their simple forms are on delightful view – branches pierce the cold air, and brown bark starkly contrasts with the frosted sky of the season. Moreover, they have sweet rest; rest from the hasty making and consuming of food, and instead live contentedly on wealth already stored up. They will soon exist in numb half-consciousness that renders the weighty, cold snow not a burden, but a divine embrace; a heavenly, chilling covering in exchange for a green, earthly one.
Waiting behind me, she needs me.
Not me, I guess, but a person, at least, to offer their presence and so disrupt that persistent darting of the mind to its more horrifying regions; to nagging needs and endless questions that are without answer.
She herself knows she is not sick, and yet every minute or so she coughs while she reads, insisting on finishing this one chapter.
Then, she will pull up her covers and sleep, no longer thinking of poisons, murderers, or uncanny creatures (and other various superstitions).
That is, as long as I am present, as a person, and lay unmoving beside her in the dark.
I was looking through my year-book from fourth grade, and suddenly realized how seriously I viewed my fellow classmates’ personalities as well as my own at that age.
I have kind of forgotten how equally real other people were to me when I was young. For some reason this thought surprises me. Have I started to think that children do not have as much serious self-consciousness as adults? Because I know this is not true, especially when I bring myself back into memories I had from those elementary school years.
There were people my age I was drawn to, people I rather disliked, people I felt shy around, and people I wished to be closer to, or felt slighted by. These were people who had deep wishes and solid personalities, with a very real sense of the world.
Why does this feel like a revelation? If I have managed to, either drastically or slightly, de-personalize children younger than me, I must urgently resensitize myself to that precious, equally human mindset and existence.
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