Archive for the ‘She’ Category
Waking
It was dark the night that I lost you; far away and dark away and so, so cold. The ice creeping up my fingers sent shivers up my spine and down my neck and I reached for your hand in the dimness because you had always been there, and I didn’t need to be able to see to find you.
It was dark, and grey, and deep shadows crawled all along the walls and the edges of my vision the night I reached for you and felt nothing but empty air. Gone, you. Gone, forsaken, disappeared into the wide world, or maybe you had never been and I had dreamt you up like I had dreamt the sun and the sky and the crystal stars.
And I sat there alone in the night waiting for you, wishing for you, closing my eyes and willing sleep to take me to you. And I stared out into that lonely night and wondered where you were, if you ever were, if you ever would be. And I watched as the long dark shadows gathered and grew and took the place of you. And I strained to hear what the night would whisper to me, but the darkness kept its secrets.
When the sun came up again I was still sitting, still waiting, still wishing. I felt the glow of the light on my face and felt my cold body warm and come alive, and I wondered if I could face this day without you. But you were never there, I’d only thought you were, and I had always been alone, and I had always been just fine without you.
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I dont know why I wrote this or what it means. I just know that I wanted to write and didn’t know what to write about—and so I just let my fingers do the thinking. I’m not sure whether that was a good idea, but I always like what comes out when I just do stream-of-consciousness writing without any plan, any idea, any focus in mind. I’m sure that this, along with similar posts I’ve done, is in some ways my subconscious speaking—I just wish it would speak less metaphorically.
It’s because this is stream-of-consciousness that I’m putting this in the “She” category, even though this one is first person, and the rest of them aren’t.
A Different Kind of Story
She’d been sailing for so long now, through blue seas and grey winds and black skies, through storms that, though no more than overly enthusiastic winds for seasoned sailors, were no less than hurricanes for her. She’d been buffeted by gales and tossed about in the waves, and she’d thrown her head back and bared her chest to the coast and let the world take her. She’d loved sailing, and she’d learned to sail alone. She could pilot this ship alone; she’d been doing it all her life. She could go on alone, if that’s what it took.
She could make it, but sometimes in the calm that came in the dark night, and increasingly under the illuminating light of day, she wished she didn’t have to be alone. She wished that she didn’t have to be strong all the time, that she could give that task to someone else and watch him take the prow and steer them into safe harbors. She didn’t need him, but she wanted him, and she was ready to let him in.
She had been writing for so long: stories of other people’s loves, of other people’s heartaches, of other people’s heartbreaks. She’d watched them come to life under her pen, smile and love and laugh; she’d given love to souls that didn’t exist outside of paper and dreams. She’d written so many stories. They were all here, pages and strewn pages, littering the floor, some of them crumpled and torn and stepped on, some of them still damp with ink. Stories and stories and stories she’d written of love, and none of them her own. And in the corner lay a stack of yellowed paper, smooth and neat, untouched. Ready for the pen.
And there was a whole new stretch of sea she’d never sailed before and yearned to sail, but couldn’t on her own. Like a soldier who has never seen battle and never felt cold steel tearing through his flesh, in her naivete she almost welcomed all it had to offer: the pain, the turmoil, the anguish, and the sorrow. She could only dream about what lay in wait out there, but she was ready to send her heart out onto the frontlines.
She was ready to write her own story.
The Writer
She sat at the tip top of a lonely cold mountain with the wind whirling around her and flakes of snow swirling about her and she wrote her way through the long winter.
It was summer down below where the sun deigned to shine and the blue birds breezed through the treetops singing, but up here it was cold winter. A winter for her alone, and a winter that brought its own strange comfort of cool ice and billows of snow. She didn’t have a pen, a desk, or paper, but it didn’t matter. She had the smooth snow, the hard ice, the face of the clouds, the dark caverns, the plane of the sky, the endless parchment of her own mind, and thoughts enough to last a hundred winters. It didn’t matter, either, that anything she wrote would be gone the next morning, cleared away by a storm in the night. She didn’t write to last forever. She wrote to write, she wrote for herself, and she wrote for the moment.
Mountain River’s Song
travelphoto.net
She sat on the bank of a river that flowed steadily and restlessly through her heart. She put her chin on her hand and dangled her feet in the cool water. She wondered if there were little silvery fishes down in the depths, flitting away from her toes. She wondered if there was one bold little fish trying to swim against the flow, trying to reach the spring from whence the river sprang, and if all the other fish going the easy way were laughing at him as they swam by, shimmery little fins flapping, grinning little bony fishy grins.
She looked up at the tall mountains surrounding her and the pale blue sky even higher overhead. For a second she closed her eyes and imagined the many millions of stars above that, and the many billions more above those, layers and layers and layers of shining dancing multitude stretching on into infinity.
She opened her eyes, gazed into the greenery around her, stuck her hands out behind her and squished the soft wet mud between her fingers, feeling the thin filaments of long pale grassroots that ran through the soil, across and across and through and through, a tangled mesh of threads sucking at the cold lonely ground.
Maybe Next Time
She didn’t jump. She didn’t jump and now she’s sitting, waiting, wondering if she should have.
She
She sat on a rock overlooking the ages.
