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?
