Pretty thing I've written #1

To one who I hardly know,

It’s another lonely evening in my life. I shouldn’t think about you, but the birds singing under the cloudy sky seem tug at the strings in my heart. The disjointed notes, so far from a melody, tease it out until I’m stretched out the window, pulled into the warm early evening air. Yes, it’s still light out, and the day hovers just outside the window full of other people and stories and other chances to make the world different.
But me? I’m here with a sad smile on my face listening to the birds dripping like liquid drops in a dish of water behind me.
There’s a moment in the course of the day, usually very early or not so late, that the bird song echoes off the pavement. It ripples around the open spaces and wraps itself among the branches of the trees.
You’re not for me, and I’m definitely not for you. Perhaps there was a moment, a brief evening in time where our hearts were teased out like the birdsong echoing in the night to ricochet back and forth across the sky and the street.
* * *
Who’d have known that the birds sing in the city? Who’d have known that one could hear them? Certainly not me. I’ve lived my life tightly tucked in the arms of the sweet country stillness. There wasn’t ever any other, nor did I want anything else. The trees and the woods and the innocence of the frogs in the pond, they cradled me in their arms and rocked me to sleep every night.
Then I moved here. The air teems with people. They are to my right and to my left and behind me and above me and over there and there and there and there… There is not a private moment, not even when you’re alone. An energy moves along the streets and passes down the hallways. At first it frightened me; I found it exhausting. Gathering the various folds and layers of the skirts of my soul, I held them tightly in, high above my knees, so that no one passing by would trample upon them. That was always a danger, to be stepped on. But now my arms don’t grow as weary. Perhaps my skirt gets shorter as my credentials grow… I’ll be America’s corporate banker before you know it.


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I like this one too. I didn't know when I wrote this my junior year of college that I'd someday end up applying for a job at a corporate bank. Funny how life works. I think my skirts have gotten longer since then, though (for the record), though they (and I!!) have certainly have gotten cuter (trust me on that one). Anyhow. I think this is pretty, too. I miss those days when I was expected to do so much "technical" or "school" writing, that a little creative interlude like this one was candy. I miss school. :(