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.
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