Pretty thing #2

Some days, you get out of bed, and the sky is still dark. It's cold in your room, and the shower is so hot that it makes your face feel dry and crackly when you emerge back into the cold world. You putz around your room, your eyes still adjusting to the bright light of a fluorescent bulb, and go through your little morning routine. Pants, socks, brush teeth. There is the sound of running water through the pipes in the wall of someone upstairs flushing a toilet. All is quiet, and sterile, and dry.

Then you open your blinds.

Outside, the first shards of sunlight have broken through the net of branches and shattered over the roof of your building, they lie, scattered, on the little circle of green grass that splays like a throw rug between sidewalks and parking lots. The trees are still dripping from last night's rain, and the helicopter seeds from the maple trees scatter the sidewalk, soggy, abandoned, the left-over troops from a failed invasion of earth by sky.So starts another day. A day of tests and failed appointments, of white lies and black moods. People toddle along, bobbing their hair aimlessly to the rhythm of their curt footsteps, lost in their own whirlwind of thoughts and preoccupations that whiz off them, spiraling to the ground.A foot lands on a sodden maple helicopter. Water oozes out and the delicate hairs and wings crush and break under the weight of so many worries, hopes, and obligations. Who looks? Who picks up the brave little souls that spiraled to the ground in a gust of wind and inspiration? Once, they, too, thought they could fly.

Thus goes the way of so many small things in our lives, memories, deep thoughts, acquaintances... they soar for a moment, then fall, still and sodden to the ground.

***

I wrote this my senior year of college; Fall 2004. I found it the other day and liked re-reading it. I was obsessed with my thesis on the construction of "self" and "identity" in Hamlet at that point (or if I wasn't, I soon would be, so close enough). I was also dating (vaguely) this goony boy from the internet. It was a pathetic attempt to get over the whole James thing, as I was recently back from abroad and dealing with the whole face-to-face seeing that person every day at school issue. Fun, fun, fun. That seems like such a long time ago. Anyhow. Yeah. That's that.