A Mental Vignette

I was just sitting at my desk.

Oddly enough, doing nothing.

There are several things I should be doing, but I'm not doing them...

...Out of spite...
   ...Out of rebellion...
      ...Out of procrastination...
         ...Out of hatred of what I've become...

            ...And simply because I'm pissy about the fact that I can only hear my boss repetitively asking everyone but me, "you selling some tickets?  you raising some money?  okay, well try harder.  this show's not selling itself."

My eyes begin to soften.  The external noises begin to warp and blur together.  I can feel my mind start to tear away from my body.  (It's a bit like trying to un-wad cling film from itself.  You can pull it apart, but it does resist a bit.)

**POP**

I'm somewhere else.  I'm in a moment I had as a doe-eyed, naive teenager.  I was standing on the bow of a ferry.

We had just boarded, our unruly group of students, exploring new lands & experiences completely foreign to our pasts.  None of us knew how to conduct ourselves on a boat.  Everything in this moment could have easily been exchanged with walking on the moon.  So we ran in circles like children around a sprinkler in summer.  My mother was fighting sea-sickness, and we hadn't even moved yet, so I felt confident that I could get away with murder & she would never notice.  She was already stroppy with me enough for being a brat on this trip.  What's one more series of pranks & selfish, child-like behavior?

As the ferry lurched forward to begin our four-hour journey across the Irish Sea, we all slowed our rampant bustling to and fro – partly because we were humbled by how powerful & nausea-inducing this thing really was, and partly because we were taken by the beauty of the rough waters.

Standing at the edge of the bow, I looked due east, our forward path.  Only I couldn't see past roughly a hundred yards due to the fact that the waters were heavily shrouded in fog.  It was as though the color of life had been leeched from the world.  I felt like I had smeared Neutral Gray #599 across the lenses of my glasses.  We were thoroughly surrounded by the color of sorrow, loss and emptiness.

What does this mean to a teenager who only knows of boys, chewing gum, gossip and rebellion?  It was so very different to anything I'd experienced in my life, that it literally rendered me silent.  I stood there, next to my best friend, and we both took it in – the deadly, white-capped waves, cutting into each other, frothing and churning – gray and white, gray and white, to and fro, chop, churn, chop, churn.

It's interesting, the smell of the color gray.  That sounds absurdly poetic, and completely unintentional. But there is a smell.  A smell just as sorrowful as the sight of it.  Wet salt with a hint of mildew and mustiness.  I imagine this is what bones smell like.  Or a cardboard box of photos and letters, stored in an attic for 20 years.

My face was clammy with humidity and salt-spray.  Ironically I felt very claustrophobic, as though the sea was trying to live again by forcing herself upon all of my senses, grasping at what little life sailed her waters.  Is this why sailors always met tragic ends?  The bitch sea raging and claiming naive lives to feed her immortality?

As with all serious moments in the springtime of our lives, it ended very quickly.  Our boisterous group of bandits urged us away from the railing to explore the various levels of the ferry.  As I ran toward the entrance to the inner corridors of the ship, I turned and looked back – convincing the others I was checking on the state of mom's sea-sickness, when in reality I wanted one last breath of gray.


**POP**

At my desk again, I felt forlorn knowing the real grayness is actually my reality, and standing on the bow of that boat was truly filled with every color of the spectrum – colors you can feel, that fill your heart full of wonder and curiosity.

Agoraphobic.
Lost in a deafening quiet.
I don't want to be here,
in this moment,
in this space.
But it seems it is all I can do
to comfort some pock mark
in the timeline.

Brazen,
Loud,
Outspoken,
Opinionated,
Only when the right moment permits.
Otherwise the tongue bleeds
from repeated bitings.
This latter bit is today.
The former was yesterday.

A yesterday I almost can't recall.

A simple trip to the market
renders me heavy in the chest.
As though I walked into a hive of bees,
dodging their attempts at defense,
the buzzing so loud,
all I can think to do is duck & run.

I see my loves
as though they're all on the other side of the glass.
They see me too,
but voices are muffled.
Light refraction & glare
cut shards across faces.
In my mind I try to compensate for
the bits of them lost to the physics
of light.
It's slow going.
It saps the oxygen from my brain.
I grow weary from this effort.

It's sometimes just easier
to retreat.

The quiet holds no offense.
It doesn't even comfort.
It simply sits to my left and right,
not interfering,
just existing,
allowing me to
polish my armor for
tomorrow's inevitable trip outdoors.

To start off with a tone of honesty, I have a mess of blog spaces all over town.

Why is this one any different, I ask myself?  I suppose it's a new rock, hiding some sort of mystery underneath its weight.  I am not alone in the search for one's own story.  I suppose it's a beautiful dichotomy of simultaneously reading & writing (acting as verbs) with each footstep, blink of an eye or exhalation...one step forward, look behind you to see how far you've come, realize you can go a little farther...

That being said, I write this for myself.  I talk to the little girl I was, I beg for more time from the old woman I will become.  Nevertheless, I address myself – unselfishly – merely to understand mistakes, regret, sorrow and even the perpetuation of happiness.

From inside this little egg, I sit.  Each post is a peck & a punch at my surrounding membrane.  I'll make my way out eventually.  But for now, I'll try this one crack at a time.

A reminder: Love yourself.  Love others just a little more.