The sky, I decided, was criminally blue.
It had a hue that was almost subversive, water-like without offering sustenance or a cessation of thirst, and I distrusted it on principle as I matched the static flecks of white on the lake with the wisps of cotton-soft cloud above it.
It was one of those moments that I insisted on as a 14 year old. I was, at that point, becoming acutely aware of my own ordinary-ness, which I wore with the discomfort of a new t-shirt that hadn’t been washed yet. However, I still demanded with the insistence of a small child that I be given private moments of contemplation. I held onto them with miserly fierceness, clutching them in my fist as though they were costume jewelry: something I thought to be precious and enviable. This was such a moment. I had yet to wrap these up in the soft-grey folds of baby blankets and toss them carelessly into a box or closet. And so I stood on the marble slabs of the great midwestern temple on the plains and stared with revulsion at the for reflecting colors that it could not absorb back to me.
The previous winter had ended. I wondered for a moment if it would have been different here. Those months of self-imposed exile, the dark, cold nights where I swallowed soup and my own bitterness from the same metal spoon would without doubt have been colder and darker. But Georgia, too, was subversive in its stillness. The air was cold, but did not move, blocked and hiding in the thick groves of pine and dormant oak trees like something slow and malevolent. Perhaps the wind here would have been stronger. The ordeal might have frozen like bubblegum in an ice box and broken off in good-natured pink chunks. The deadly lachrymose howling of winter wind here might have gathered up my sadness and tossed it in shards across the expansive woodlands and fields of the frozen north. Instead, I held it like a ball of strange medicine in the pit of my gut. I’d kept it private, too, overestimating how desirable my own private tragedy had been to those around me. I pull my long sleeves down over my wrist, excusing the too-hot-for-the-weather attire to modesty and preference.
I thought, too, of a piece of fire wood that I’d taken into the house that same winter and laid on the floor of my bedroom. Two branches had sprouted from it, giving it a vaguely human shape. I’d thought for a moment about a story I’d heard of a childless couple who simply took a stump from the forest and raised it as their own, feeding and bathing it as though it would grow as tall as its sister-trees that hadn’t fallen to a careless blade. I thought, too, of how their hearts must have broken when the stump was malevolent, when it slowly grew in appetite until it ate them both in large, splintered bites. It must be, I thought, entirely tragic to be eaten up by what you had seen life and beauty in. With that, I plugged a tool into the wall and drilled the firewood full of holes for reasons I can no longer remember.
It had a hue that was almost subversive, water-like without offering sustenance or a cessation of thirst, and I distrusted it on principle as I matched the static flecks of white on the lake with the wisps of cotton-soft cloud above it.
It was one of those moments that I insisted on as a 14 year old. I was, at that point, becoming acutely aware of my own ordinary-ness, which I wore with the discomfort of a new t-shirt that hadn’t been washed yet. However, I still demanded with the insistence of a small child that I be given private moments of contemplation. I held onto them with miserly fierceness, clutching them in my fist as though they were costume jewelry: something I thought to be precious and enviable. This was such a moment. I had yet to wrap these up in the soft-grey folds of baby blankets and toss them carelessly into a box or closet. And so I stood on the marble slabs of the great midwestern temple on the plains and stared with revulsion at the for reflecting colors that it could not absorb back to me.
The previous winter had ended. I wondered for a moment if it would have been different here. Those months of self-imposed exile, the dark, cold nights where I swallowed soup and my own bitterness from the same metal spoon would without doubt have been colder and darker. But Georgia, too, was subversive in its stillness. The air was cold, but did not move, blocked and hiding in the thick groves of pine and dormant oak trees like something slow and malevolent. Perhaps the wind here would have been stronger. The ordeal might have frozen like bubblegum in an ice box and broken off in good-natured pink chunks. The deadly lachrymose howling of winter wind here might have gathered up my sadness and tossed it in shards across the expansive woodlands and fields of the frozen north. Instead, I held it like a ball of strange medicine in the pit of my gut. I’d kept it private, too, overestimating how desirable my own private tragedy had been to those around me. I pull my long sleeves down over my wrist, excusing the too-hot-for-the-weather attire to modesty and preference.
I thought, too, of a piece of fire wood that I’d taken into the house that same winter and laid on the floor of my bedroom. Two branches had sprouted from it, giving it a vaguely human shape. I’d thought for a moment about a story I’d heard of a childless couple who simply took a stump from the forest and raised it as their own, feeding and bathing it as though it would grow as tall as its sister-trees that hadn’t fallen to a careless blade. I thought, too, of how their hearts must have broken when the stump was malevolent, when it slowly grew in appetite until it ate them both in large, splintered bites. It must be, I thought, entirely tragic to be eaten up by what you had seen life and beauty in. With that, I plugged a tool into the wall and drilled the firewood full of holes for reasons I can no longer remember.
We wander back inside the dome of the Capitol and I stare out to water on either side.
“Where,” I think to myself, “could you run here if you wanted to?”
I think of the answer, but hold it in the same tight firsts where I kept what I assumed everyone wanted from me.
“Where,” I think to myself, “could you run here if you wanted to?”
I think of the answer, but hold it in the same tight firsts where I kept what I assumed everyone wanted from me.
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