Sensitivity

At times she found herself so deeply lost in the cavern of her being that a single utterance to another human being could leave her drained. Only empathy and compassion permitted her to overcome the alienation. Sometimes these emotions would consume her so completely that she had to fight back tears. Then she could no longer tell the difference between empathy, compassion, and pity. It ailed her to know that the emotional force which so often tied her to a fellow being was sadness.

There are people like her who are made for solitude and shadows, but sometimes the silence becomes frighteningly singular. When the silence starts to ring in your ears, it becomes necessary to fight it with the voice and presence of another human being. But how arduous it was to speak to this other presence with the distillation of who she was - to articulate in quotidian verbiage, the trickle of clarity that dripped so placidly at her core. She felt at her pith, a concentrated radiance that could never emerge. She liked to believe that everyone possessed this same crystalline thread of humanity; that it was just concealed beneath the congealed layers of despondency and human error.

It would startle you, to catch her gaze. Even in daily affairs - ordering food at a restaurant, paying at the cashier's....her eyes do not merely flit across the surface of the other's existence. Her fiercely searching eyes, sometimes forlorn, tend to pierce one with disturbing recognition. She knows that sometimes others mistake her gaze as one of judgment, and so she looks away when she speaks, peers out at you beneath her bangs, but still can't avoid searching for the diamond of luminosity hidden in the other human being.

Into Slumber

Here, the sun does not set till after ten. The light takes on a dusty glow before settling into darkness. Imminence does not encapsulate me as heavily as it did before, because sometimes I fall asleep with the light, before the day softens to rosy hues and finally to star speckled sky. Yet, just the thought of night awakens me to vastness. It is as if the relief of some prolonged yawn overcomes me, and transforms me to a weightless shadow, and then the universe within me lengthens into sleep. Consciousness dips into the pool of dreams. Being settles and surrenders.

The Moving Curtain

The methodical ticking of the bedside clock accompanies the incremental progression of the day. The curtain ripples and billows gently, giving form to an otherwise invisible breeze. I am placated. Even though the din of city traffic refuses to die, nature continues its silent exhalations. The curtain stirs, dancing to the gentle breaths of some magical force. Its movement lulls me. Serenity permeates me. Limpidity becomes me.

Shadows

In shadows he stood, his own shadow before him was a harsh, black, cutout. He was in a valley somewhere, with the moon looming large, and emanating a strange, white light. The kind of light that is like a flash; light that transitions the soul from one state of consciousness to another. The light was a catalyst to the foreign. In the light, his shadow seemed to him, a silhouette of his errors. It terrified him to see this flat echo of himself - the thin slip of his being that was so weightless. His terror was like the light - point blank without crescendo or decrescendo. Fear was nakedly present within him, like an alert startle. The light had trapped him in suspended terror, and it seemed that he was fated to stand there at the mercy of light and shadow.

His shadow wavered gently, as if struggling to awaken from its stupor and metamorphose to some new physicality. He gazed up at the moon - the perpetrator of his angst. It was not beautiful. It was only a colossal electric orb that hummed and flickered, and his shadow was like a dumb moth, bewitched by its luminosity. He began to hum the tuneless rhythm of panic even though he realized that it was his distorted imagination that was fabricating such fear. Even as he quickened his pace, he knew that on another night, he would be just as likely to find the ghostly moon, and its conspiratorial shadows things of poetic intrigue.

Recess

The little girl has her head tilted to the side. I think she listens out of habit. Even if there was nothing but silence, her head will always have the tilt of an inquisitive listener. Her hair is neatly done up in braids, and her uniform is perfectly white and uncreased. Her white socks and bata shoes are equally pristine. She is sitting on the concrete steps with her hands in her lap as she watches the other little girls playing hopscotch and jumping rope. From time to time she watches the black crows swooping down in front of her, and pecking at the ground.

She is startled when one of her schoolmates runs up to her and tugs her hand. She wants the little girl to join them in their game of hopscotch. The little girl shyly shakes her head no, and the other girl pouts, sticks her tongue out, and runs off. The little girl is relieved. She is too afraid to jump rope, or to dangle from the monkey bars. The extremity of her shyness immobilizes her, and she is too young to know that fear is surmountable. For now she watches the others. She waits for the bell to ring, and she gazes for as long as she can at the shifting sky before the sunlight becomes intolerable.

Can't or Won't

I am afraid.

I'd never say it out loud, except maybe to a lover without looking him in the eye.

Resolve

At the end of the corridor, you will notice the silhouette of a woman. Her back will be turned to you. Her head and shoulder will be leaning against the door frame. From where you are you will conjecture that she is deep in thought, but she will be waiting for you, listening intently to your hesitant approach, to your barely audible footsteps against the cold marble floor.

All you will be able to distinguish is the saturated, velvet darkness of her form. It will be too dark to distinguish the color of her dress, or the hue of her skin. The woman is the shadow. She will not budge, and it will make you wonder if what you see is a phantom. I cannot tell you what she is, only what you will perceive. If she moves it will frighten you. You will be so intent on preserving her stillness that every step will become threatening, every foot forward, a controlled endeavor. You will not know her name, but suddenly, and without knowing why, you will sense something familiar about this woman. This familiarity will terrify you, but you will not flee because of the perversity of hope: the hope that when she turns around you will realize how beautiful she is.

But you don't know if you will be able to survive the split second of horror: the moment right before she fully turns around and reveals herself to you. You cannot turn back. It would be worse if she saw you leaving.

Now you are right behind her, and still, she has not turned around. She will not reveal herself until you want her to, because she senses your fear as if it were her were own. She is hardly breathing because of your fear, not hers'. You place your hand on her waist, and the warmth of her body floods into you.

She feels a hand slithering and coming to rest on her waist, then sliding to her front. She reaches down at the touch, to the touch, for touch. The hand presses her backwards towards the strength of a human body - your's.

She leans back into your chest, and feels the violence of a man's fear. Or is it the cadence of passion that she feels? She doesn't know. She won't turn around, until she knows you want her to, until she knows for sure that you want her.