An Illustrated Mind, Part 2

Music: Bloodbank by Bon Iver, Laughing With by Regina Specktor, and The Garden That You Planted by Sea Wolf

An Illustrated Mind, Part 1

Music: China by Chris Holmes, Postcards From Italy by Beirut, and How It Ends by Devotchka

Words

One morning I woke up not knowing where I was. My bed was suspended on a tightrope between grass and gravel, and it was tipping precariously towards the chasm beneath. I’ve never been able to balance.

Quark by quark I crept toward the grass, because grass is prettier than gravel, obviously. It wasn’t until hours later when I realized that I forgot two directions: Up and Down. I am mildly superstitious, the kind of person who always has to tie the left shoe before the right, except that I live in Marin now and I always wear flip flops, so I looked up first. I saw a cloud. It looked awfully fluffy and inviting, but what if it was only fluff? Besides, if I chose to go up then gravity would inevitably bring me back down, so I guess up and down are really synonymous in practice, even though the dictionary says they’re antonyms.

Below me I didn’t see anything, which was scary. I don’t know why nothing is scary, but it is. I don’t really understand the word nothing, because nothing is something. The word nothing shouldn’t exist. So I looked down at the nothingness realizing that it was actually something, and then I looked in front of me realizing that I was no further along than I had been before. I didn’t want to be suspended forever, but I didn’t have the courage to stop clinging (don’t we all?), so I go of myself to let go of the rope by making myself into an inanimate object, which is good, because when you’re relaxed the impact of the fall is weakened. Falling is only scary for a minute or two, and then you start to relax. That made me feel better. Then I got bored. Isn’t that strange?
I got really, really, really bored because I was just falling for what seemed like forever into nothing which was something! Gradually, boredom gave way to hunger (how long had I been falling?), but you can’t really eat food when you’re plummeting towards oblivion, not that I had any to begin with, except for tic-tac’s, which I always have, but I was afraid of choking on them, which has happened before because I accidentally fell asleep with tic-tac’s in my mouth.

So I ate words instead: big words and small words and articles and prepositions and verbs and nouns and adjectives and adverbs and I couldn’t stop.
Pejorative.
It.
But.
Fuck.
Catalyze.
She ran into a wall and didn’t stop.
And.
Louisville.
Ojala.
Acquire.
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
Respond.
Please.
And it went on and on and on like that (I should have known to savor them) until I felt sick but I was addicted (how could I stop?). Yesnomaybe as Halt! Finally came out of my mouth and I regurgitated the intoxicating libretti. It came out and out and out of me as if I were rewinding the last forever time. Blood. Guts.
Bones. I thought there would be nothing left inside of me.
And then I stopped falling and I stopped feeling because I had no words left.
Nil.
I had landed on a pile of words.
My own words, that is, if words can belong to anyone.
No, they can’t.
I landed on a pile of everybody’s words.
I’m still there, right now.
Searching for a way to put the words back inside of me.

A Day at the Beach

I went to the beach today. I frolicked with Grace. I ridiculed Lizzie and her boyfriend, Dylan. I saw the waves lick the beach and reach out towards my feet—I let them. I saw the vast sky of H2O inspire its curious tongue. I felt the vestige of the sea cling to my ankles and the fringe of my mahogany corduroy pants. I felt the soft foam and wished that all the world could be as tender. Remnants of seashells lay scattered across the shore, already picked apart by cavorting, rowdy children. But the ocean doesn’t mind—it likes to give, and every day it will continue to do so.
Lizzie and Dylan touched each other and clung to each other and doted on each other like teenage love. They danced and Dylan lifted her up and carried her in his arms and when he set her down they landed on a fury of sand and laughter. They petted each other like household cats and they were beautiful to watch because of their carefree happiness and sun-tousled hair. It was fun to watch them, or funny, because they took all their frivolous gestures so seriously and I couldn’t help harassing them even if I wanted to.
Grace and I pressed our bare feet on the air-pockets of the sand, delightfully satisfying some odd and inexplicable desire that neither of us knew we had. Every once and a while we would peer over our sun-brushed shoulders and laugh at the oblivious and inseparable pair behind us.
Days like this are never supposed to end… I would give everything for those minutes to be converted into years… and for those years to be the whole of my life. But my wish will not be granted, so I will content myself with my memory and when I find myself in my wretched bio class I will recall that this time yesterday or the day before yesterday or a week or a month or months ago I laughed and skipped and cared for nothing but the moment and dreamed of nothing but to be myself and be where I was forever.