Perhaps

Beginning at some unimaginable location an unfathomable distance away, it gradually bends and twists its way toward a greenscaped lot. The trees try to resist it, but eventually bend aside and allow its passage to continue. A lonely leaf leaps from the earth in an attempt to sail, but only lasts a trivial distance before fluttering back to a new home on the ground. The breeze crests the escarpment of a gorge, and gathers itself into an accelerated crack of an invisible whip. Across the park it flows and in its progression snatches something up and twirls it on its perch.

That something was once brightly colored in its peacock-like radiance, now slightly muted with the years' progressive dimming of the jacket's hue, color, and saturation levels. A hood reaches high from the jacket to cling to an unwavering prominence on a plain, galvanized, and stolid chain-link fence. The fence hook has a firm grasp on the jacket's tenuous reach, with no fear of losing grip in the midst of the brief tumults.

The jacket is not quite so certain, and in its effort to cling to its precarious perch, it swings and flails in the breeze, sometimes wildly and other times more demurely; but always moving about. The entire garment transforms from hanging limply to straining at an angle with less than a moment's notice. This swaying is oft accompanied by an odd sleeve snapping straight out, a perfect mimicry of some forgotten military salute demonstrating understanding and obedience. The body twists and spins while this gale, in particular, attempts to succeed where previous winds have failed, by spiriting the jacket away into a forgotten state of being.

Despite the zephyr's insistence, the outerwear endures in its misappropriated state of lost-and-not-foundness. It has been misplaced by some person(s) out there, who right now may not even notice its absence, and it has been left to ride the currents as only the breezes see fit.

But -- Things don't just disappear into a state of being lost; a cause often lies in the carelessness or inattentiveness of people, resulting in the unfortunate mislaying.

Who was they, that could lose something so obviously well cherished?
What was the cause of the disappearance?
Where was the carelessness?
When was the inattentiveness?
How did those failures become subtle withdrawals, magnifying to the point of the mislaying?

Why did this tunic get left behind?

The faded colors, the repaired lacerations, the nearly-worn-through abrasions indicate this particular item was of some significance.

Perhaps the person(s) responsible feel like they have lost a best friend.

Perhaps they feel sad. Perhaps they loved that jacket. Perhaps it felt like family to them.


Perhaps... they understand it as a relationship that has been hung on chain-link fence to toil in the wind; forgotten and unwanted.

That item is certainly well missed.

Inescapable

The sound of a shovel plunging into the earth is jarring; each cacophonous impact sets a chill to climbing up me, vertebrae by vertebrae. I shrug the tingles away, strengthened by an encompassing focus on my dig, while time slips by seemingly unnoticed. If I pause, though, I feel as if I've been at this my whole life; blisters have callused, shoulders have grown taught with muscle, and my back has rounded with the repeated weight of the cumbersome process. Metronomically, I toil with a predictable rhythm, one tick accompanies a stab of the soil, one tock carries a load of dirt flung high over my shoulder.

Is this getting harder to do? I can't tell, I've no time to stop and consider. The shovel is impatient, after all.

With my head down and bent to my work, I think about how it must be light soon. The sun should be breaching the sky just over my left shoulder any minute now, and I anticipate an illumination on the horizon. Contrarily, no births of light pique my notice, possibly a trick of time while I am so ensconced with my task: I must have worked right through the new dawn, the dusk that followed, and now find myself so obviously in the midst of the succeeding night.

Why do my ponderings of the hour only percolate, through the haze of my focus, in the dark of nights? I seem to excel at pursuing my labor, despite and without noticing, the warmth or the brilliance of each day. But, I've no recollection that it was always just so. And so day after day, or night after night, as it were, my exertion continues.


Stab, lift, throw.

Thrust, hoist, heave.


In the dark of dark, one such launching leaves a feeling of something different under my shirt, through my spine: a cascading descent, very different and more tangible than the usual, familiar crawling ascent. With an annoyed shake of my head, I fling away the particles of soil that clung to my scalp during their free fall. The metronome cannot be disobeyed, so I brush aside my agitation, like so much loam, and skip not one beat.

Again and again, now, my tosses are missing their mark and I am repeatedly showered in the flesh of the earth. But so ingrained is the omnipresent tick ... tock, it is an irresistible drive forward, and I double down on my struggles. Although, a feeling begins to creep in, gently pushing against the curtain that protects my fixation on my excavation.

That feeling seems to be bordering on numb... Physically numb.

My feet are covered in dirt, rising almost to meet my knees. Clearly, I've not progressed my task for quite some time, and whats more, my chilled-through extremities are shaking in a most unreasonable manner. I am being engulfed. By my own hands. And devotion to my drudgery. Even the familiar sound of the chronometer is muffled under the weight of the filth, temporarily allaying its lethal grip on me.

My searching hands disclose no secrets but cold, loose-fill walls.
My pricked ears gather nothing but silence.
My observational nose samples only the obvious: olfactory earthiness.
My Scouring eyes tell no story but darkness.

Almost total darkness. All dark but a subtle, effusive gleam from directly above.

A revelation is coagulating within my psyche: My jaded mind saw only a prevalence of night while I worked at my compulsive task. But the truth is more abstract than that; less black and white, and more gray.

The truth is... when you've dug this deep,
it's always night down here.

My job had begun on the surface, with never a thought to any possible necessity for tools of egress; the project was never meant to be a hole, never intended to continue so long and gradually, never aimed to burrow so deep.

Buried under the living and amongst the dead,
the assimilation into this new community of inert peers
is inescapable.

Drawings

The glass is fogged over inside, rivulets of water pocking the outside. Your shaky hand reaches, finger outstretched, and places two small dots and an upwardly curved line in the fog finish. The face stares at you as jet air blows, increasingly warmer by the moment, across the matte surface from somewhere unseen.

Watching it closely, you balk as your masterpiece--your intention--begins to morph into something unrecognizable. The very touch of your finger had already caused streaks to form and smears to run with gravity's ceaseless insistence. And now... now your work is slowly fading; from the bottom up the lines begin to blur and the edges begin to soften.

Minor panic grabs hold as you take your original instrument, the quivering finger, and make a vain effort at retouching your vision. Gentle at first, so as not to disturb the prototypical incarnation; then more aggressively, with broader strokes and abandoned regard for the fine edges, as you realize your efforts aren't taking.

Your brain spins like a dreidel, the sides like flashing options and ideas, moving too quickly to focus upon. The unsteady hand, mere seconds ago hanging poised for action only a paper's breadth from your canvas, now rests in your lap still and steadied. The tangible creation, born of your very hand, continues with its show-stopper disappearing act that even the great Harry H could not hope to match.

Now... now the vision is gone. There is nothing to see but the backdrop of the world on the other side.
Acceptance of the attrition has not even set in, when the earthly scenery without begins to move; slowly at first, but ramping up to a blurring pace that you cannot fathom to make sense of.

You sit. Slumped, but tensely.
You stare. That soft vision, blurred and only tangentially recognizable.
You mull. Bemusedly.


One breath. One warm breath. One simple, warm, breath.

With precision placement a ghost of a shadow would return: a template to trace from.

More

There is inherently something magical about seeing the moon in the daytime sky; the pocked, soft-whitish orb with its oft-irregular edges, floating amidst the gentle blue backdrop. In my mind it adds a kind of depth to something that I've often taken for granted as flat, the end, the edge of what is.

But the truth is that there is more, and the moon is that in-my-face reminder, a celestial "to be continued," a hand breaching the surface of the water.

The way it waxes and wanes in visibility, with one day a full circle hovering overhead, another day just the edge of a ghostly silhouette hanging on unseen thread, and yet other days where there is nothing to be seen at all creates a foreshadowing of thought. Because it isn't seen, does that mean it isn't there; a quantum situation; Schroedinger's Moon?

No.
It's there.

Maybe it is sometimes concealed by an obtrusive mountainous horizon, or seen frequently with less than maximum opacity, or often visible as just a piece of what you know its true form is, but... It is there; somewhere.

The conclusion, though often cloudy, is a simple one:
 

               For wont of missing it, don't stop looking...

                               There is more than what you see.

Click

A single dim light shines down from overhead, casting a muted halo on the floor as it diffuses subtly to the rest of the room.

From that floor reaches a set of four legs up to the cushioned seat of a high, backless stool that has been situated slightly askew to the counter top.

The counter top is cold and veined, with speckles of geological debris reflecting bits of the sparse lighting; a small, dark puddle treading its surface, hungrily absorbing as many of those reflections as possible.

That dark puddle creates its own refractions as tiny ripples slide along the surface and ever so slightly expand the puddle's reach; each set of ripples catalyzed by the tumultuous splashdown of another droplet.

Viewed in high-zoom slow motion, the droplets' vast two-inch descent would be detailed by the traveling flare of illumination temporarily stolen from the overhead source, beginning from the first moment it stretched and swelled and reached itself away from the uncorked lip of the overturned bottle.

On its side lay the tinted glass bottle, its neck pointing toward some never possibility; unmoving and unchanging, a glint reflects, carrying yet another ray of light in yet another direction.

A single dim light shines down from overhead.

With a simple --click--
...
Lights out.

On the Edge

"Walking a tightrope" is a metaphor often employed to describe the feeling of being in such a precarious position as to believe a fall one way or the other is imminent--with a set of circumstances each, respective of which rope-side the plummet occurs. Another way people describe this, perhaps with a finer point, is to say that they are on the "razor's edge."

Close your eyes. Combine the imagery from the two cliches. You might see a humorous scene play out where a man is treading the fine point of the edge of a massive razor, while holding a long balancing pole and subtly swaying back and forth; a life-long sea captain newly relegated to the land. But this scene is savage in the way it truly lacks in humor for those aboard that edge.

The abysses to either side of the edge have each their respective matrices of consequences, actions, decisions, paths, etc. To one side may be option A, to the other option B. The chasm to the left might be a yes, while a chasmic no stretches to the right. An I should; an I shouldn't. A helplessness; a hope. Trusts; doubts. The discrepancies between these is such a fine line, it often becomes desirous to rewind the words and actions that've made this perch list about: to and fro, up and down, this way and that.

Regrets become the mechanism of jostled footing. 

Were it yourself, you would likely think, "If I can just make to the end of this edge, I'll be safe." But does anyone ever make it across that tender trail? Focus is piled upon focus to progressively tread ahead and what lies to each side encompasses all consideration; to the fault of ignoring the most dangerous outcome of all.

So--

Should you find yourself with balancing pole in hand, gingerly toeing down a razor's edge, seeping anxiety over tumbling from your perch toward one of the yawning darknesses to either side, remember the very nature of a razor:

There is another--often unspoken--way out...

You stumble and the razor cuts you through.

Hope

I had hoped you would say, “Yes.”

Had hoped you would say, “Please.”

Hoped you would say, “Don’t.”

You would say, “Stay.”

Would say, “Here.”

Say, “Goodnight.”

I had hoped you would say... something.

I hope I can survive silence.

----------------------------------------------------

"The trick, however, is to remember that hope is a perilous thing, that it's not a steel and concrete bridge across the void between this moment and a brighter future. Hope is no stronger than tremulous beads of dew strung on a filament of spider web, and it alone can't long support the terrible weight of an anguished mind and a tortured heart."

-Dean Koontz, "Sieze the Night"

Walls

The whitewashed companions surround the room, rising from floor to ceiling, mostly unadorned save for a glossy frame here, or a dusty candelabra there. Events happen here, in this room, with these stalwart companions; conversations, musings, tears, silences, songs. They remember these things, and if you look and listen closely it might just be possible to hear words once said playback, or to see times once spent rewind.

The walls have eyes, you see?

Extrinsic eyes like portholes to the outside world; a thumbnail clip of things possibly missed as moments speed along without the room. Though like our own eyes, windows can be shuttered to block out what we don’t want to see, or others to see in us.

In an aggravatedly anthropomorphistic vein, inward eyes watch the private moments of the room, each catalogued with a respectively appropriate representation: a smile, a sagging head, a dance step, a tear falling. These eyes are unshuttered; they see and let us be seen.

The walls have ears, too.

Who among us is not guilty of conversation amidst the lack of sentient company? Perhaps a troublesome project required the oration of thoughts in order to find a way through. Maybe the day’s petulance caught up and was turned back with a private monologue. Whatever it may be, where did those words, whether spoken in love or discord, go off to? Did they just cease to exist the moment the sound waves had dissipated? Tell that to a historian.

What if those omnipresent companions heard and made invisible records of each precious word spent in their presence? They’re always there; they’re always willing to listen.

The walls have a mouth, if you bear with me.

I’ve shouted before: in public, in private, where others could hear, or where no soul could hear. But I’ve never felt so heard as when the paint and plaster respond. Try it some time, call it a bucket list thing: source a clear space, with a listener’s mind, and just talk. If you pay careful attention, the walls will reply immediately. Oh sure, it’s a fair bit like a well-trained parrot speaking, but have you considered that maybe, in some way, your voice was heard and understood and sympathized with in that faint echo?

So why do we identify rooms lacking in people as “empty?” Every single one of them has the ability to see you and to let you see. Each the prowess to hear you out. Each the compassion to acknowledge you in your moment.

I posit a simple answer, a hypothesis—with theory potential—as to the solitude of the empty rooms:

The walls do not have arms.

You choose...

     You’re at a high school football game.

     Two gilded-top young ladies with matching pleated skirts and matching bright smiles walk onto the field carrying tall poles, stretched between which is a large cut of creamy white paper, marked and colored with the fierce insignia of the local mascot. The band members, and yet more matchy-matchy young ladies, form a line behind each of the banner poles, creating a sort of corridor that leads unidirectionally to the backside of that giant paper. Something stirs inside you, and catches you in one of those cerebral moments where the world around you ceases to exist.

-----

     Well over three times your height the pickets on both sides of you stretch on ahead into forever, seeming to end only when they form a corner, but then mockingly they continue on into yet another forever. Stretched loosely taught between each and every picket is a white material; bright, clean, reflective, and it shows an occasional shadowy figure passing by on what can only be described as the outside. How did anyone get out there?

     This makeshift corridor is of an undeterminable width that always seems to wax and wane in a fashion that only barely accommodates the quantity of occupants flowing through; there is always a great quantity of occupants. Shoulder to shoulder to shoulder and spaced tightly front to back, you have no real option but to keep up the shuffle of your feet in stutter step fashion, with the others, down that corridor to forever. The most individuality you seem to be able to muster is the act of swiveling your head from side to side, taking in the sight of the multitudes around you. It dawns on you in a sudden lump-in-your-stomach kind of way, not unlike the feeling when you stub your toe, that these are not your peers or anyone you want to be following. Why are you here?

     A perforation in the wall-like structure, so small that it may not even truly exist, catches your eye and fills your mind with thoughts of beautiful abnormality. It’s unexplainable, but you are moth-to-flame with that random, unclear imagery in your mind; it must be pursued. The progress is so incredibly difficult, more so than even like that of a fish trying to swim upstream, but you slowly manage to wriggle and shimmy yourself laterally through the mass of bodies milling ever so lemmingly onward. Not without a number of steps back and so very few forward, you manage a journey toward the side of the flow, near the restrictive bulwark. Who are all these others?

     At the edge of the crowd, you’re fighting not to be crushed against the sides while simultaneously daunted by the way the barrier seems to stretch above you infinitely and unassailably. One finger at a time, you begin dragging your hand along the wall; feeling the way it gives slightly under the pressure you apply, and hearing the rasp of friction between skin and structure. How does this hold so many?

     A strange feeling blossoms inside you—maybe even in your soul—but something ignites and begins to smolder; whether it is hope, creativity, a sense of self, or something else entirely is more than ambiguous to you. Whatever it is, that something is frustrating in the way it tickles your mind, anxiety-inducing for the way it vagues the future, and it is undeniable. What does it mean?

     You jerk slightly as another shadowy silhouette passes immediately next to you on the other side of the looming impediment; you could swear it was the shape of a person skipping past. Something pulls at your finger as the milling throng around you continues to drive you forward, shuffle by shuffle. The start you had from the abruptness of that joyful shadow apparently caused you to push your reaching finger through the obstacle that you and all these others had for so long treated as a wall. Pushed onward, past the impossible hole that you impossibly made that had impossibly snagged your finger, you crane your neck behind to see what had happened, but the flow of bodies is just too great and ultimately irresistible. What was that?

     Your hand is the same. The barrier is the same. The others around are the same. Puzzle pieces in your mind begin to lock together and you feel that thing, that undeniable something, flare from a smolder into mature flames. Frantically searching about, your eyes so wide they're showing enough white to make you worry that you might blend into the partition next to you, there is not a hint of recognition to be seen from any in the crowd for the impossible epiphany you’ve just alighted upon. Does nobody see me?

     A clenched fist, a deep breath, and eyes squeezed so tightly shut you feel a tiny wetness forming on your eyelashes, are all you have time for before you find yourself leaping… And now your shoulder is throbbing from a hard landing and a bit of a tumble. Never having realized how dark the corridor was that you had wandered for so long, the brightness that now surrounds you begins to draw the aches from your body. The creamy white wall that slid so smoothly under your fingertips with the soft whispery sound of skin on paper—Paper. Paper is what these kinds of walls are made of—is gone. All of those walls are gone. That empathetic brightness now enveloping you in a myriad of impossibilities made possible also shines out on a vast, open, expanse; every possible direction is open to your choosing.

 -----

Ripping and tearing, the football players crash through the paper banner, snatching and tossing away pieces of the colorful logo that remain attached to the supports; the fragile barricade is demolished and they are ready to begin a new game.

--

Which way will you go now?

Catharsis

One foot in front of the other; a ceaseless cascade of background noise, fluctuating in concert with the changing textures under sole. Something about looking down and focusing on the earth blurring beneath you provides a metronome-like effect that enhances the more important foreground sounds. That distant focus seems to have a revealing effect on the subtleties, like the way those magic-eye pictures worked; soften your focus and suddenly a new image presents itself.

The ground passing below is like a magic-eye picture for the ears: tone of voice becomes more potent, pauses in speech seem broader, a rushed thought has more excitement, and all is thus more meaningful. The light seems to change with the passing of each step, waning itself from clear and pervasive to a softening tint, as if just a beat behind the perfect mimicry of the mood; not ominous--just muted, calm, and full of color.

Open emotion makes words seem to float, hanging weightless for just a moment, as they are passed back and forth. Gestures have all but been replaced in favor of those heightened verbal cues. The course remains slow--in a natural way--plodding, and without the distraction of a target destination. The air has an amount of comfort to it, so as to make it unnoticed, bolstered by the subtly ebbing scent of rose.


These are the makings of catharsis;
the pieces of connection;
the beginning of soulful ablution;
the fostering of tribe.



Catharsis is a park... and never noticing the trees.