Day One.
Trap snapped shut
Bones crack like the crackle of fire
Hair bristles like a soldier’s salute to the grave
Arms folded like American flags
Trying to pull in the pain
Gathering it slowly like a child to your chest
Cradle this cacophony of chaos
Like a bullet ricocheting in your brain
I am the fox with barred teeth under snarling lips
Peeled back like onion skin from the bone white beneath
With frantic eyes and fearful heart
Waiting for the hunter to find me.
I spent a lot of time this semester sitting in a library, neck craned, eyes strained, and brain drained. Even though these places are beautiful in their own majestic academic ways, with towering columns that have held up the burdening weight of university, I can’t help but feel closed in by four walls. There is so much outside those tall grandiose windows that let light drift gently in to illuminate the library walls.
I always sit and watch as the library is lit by the dazzling color of sunset as I sat with my textbooks splayed out in front of me like the casualties of war, thinking of the beauty outside the rows and rows of books that lined the world around me. Yet, even as the colors began to fade to a darker shade and slip farther and farther away, I would remain. Instead of taking a breath and leaving behind my books for a moment, I would dive right back in, but my air never lasted sufficiently. It felt like drowning because it was. Diving back down without a replenishing breath of air is a scary thing, yet almost everyone in that library with me was doing it. Gasping like a fish out of water, watching with wide glassy eyes the cast off colors of a sunset sitting right out side, but like the shadows in Plato’s Cave, we tried to draw real light from only the shadows of reality.
I am tired of the shadows of reality, and I have been growing tired because I have drained these shadows dry and am ready, craving for more. So I have abandoned my beautiful little box for the outside world. I have been drinking in the color of every sunset, and finding every place that one can fit themselves only to sit down and read. The familiar is full of fascinating places to explore that function just as well as a library seat for a place to rest my book. Whether it means climbing rooftops or climbing mountains just for a nice place to cross my legs and lay open a book infront of me, I have been exploring in the name of reading. Even if but for a short while to crack open the spine of a book while over looking the Golden Gate Bridge, or just sitting underneath the shade of a great redwood, or sitting on a cliff above the tumultous sea, I am expanding. I am ready for new horizons, if you need me, I will be at the cusp of the ordinary, waiting.
Laughter is strung out between souls
Souls that will never touch or see one another
But still feel the tug and pull
Of the string between two cans
That vibrates as words crawl from one to another
Spanning the space between those who cannot see
But still believe
Like whispered secrets sent from window to window
By children without bed times or nightlights to guide them
They cling to that string and use it to weave a life
With or without finding the end of that thread
The thread that pulls and strains
As time places the weight of distance
On the iron shoulders of eternity
Strumming the string of vitality
Feeling the shiver before the break
The untwining of the thread
Right before it unravels
That last grasping second as time slows
Before there is the
Break
Can you hear the laughter drifting away
On the ends of a broken string
It echoes out and fades
Never to reach the end of that line
That was strung too tight
But never tight enough to hold the other
Anchored at the end
Where two souls would become one
Like a violin strung too tight
The wires scream and grind until
The breaking point
And the twang of a string destroyed by the twisting of time
The loss of sound with a deafening silence
Brought about by the abundance of sound
At the end of an unraveling thread
That carried so many secrets
So many laughs on sunny days
The sounds of a soul crying for the other
Will never find their way
Left alone now in the world
Knowing no one is on the other end of that string
No one to listen or care
Just the silence
Suspended on the wind
Until it is picked up again
