Fissioned

Dawn threatened to break. The early morning peace was fragmented by the melodic chirping of some invisible bird. He could feel the crisp, cool air against his skin through the cracked open window. In the seat to his left, the girl was still asleep. Her chest rose and fell to the calm rhythm of her breathing. Deep in slumber, she was unconscious of her own existence; of the automatic persistence of her body, and the serene, vital energy that emanated with each breath. From time to time her eyelids seemed to quiver almost imperceptibly, and her lashes would flutter lightly, as if she were on the verge of awakening. Every movement filled him with anticipation and drove him to the brink of his heart. He waited for slumber to release her.

When he turned back to look at her, he was surprised to find her already awake, and observing him with a steadfast gaze. In subtle ways like this, she was always evading him. Every time he blinked, or glanced away, it seemed as if some small, but essential part of her was slipping through his fingers. " You elude me", he murmured, a slight smile playing at the corners of his lips. The girl sighed heavily, as if in defeat, although it was really him who should be feeling defeat.

"I want to go home. I should be home," the girl said softly. Her voice was still subdued by the heaviness of sleep.

"You are home", he said quietly, not wanting to break the hushed interior of their insular world. The girl looked around her, and recognition flickered in her eyes. They were parked just around the corner of her house. She turned back to look at him, frowning in confusion. "What happened?"

"You feel asleep on the drive home. I couldn't bear to wake you". He became afraid that his impractical explanation would offend her, but she just closed her eyes for a moment and smiled.

"You couldn't bear to let me go you mean". The lightening sky cast an ethereal glow on her face, making her skin seem almost unearthly.

"I should go before my parents notice I'm gone," she said. She turned to face him entirely, but made no move to leave.

"Of course," he said, "I've held you captive long enough".

she gazed at him unblinkingly, and said gravely, "You can't keep me you know".

He had become accustomed to these moments when she confronted him with a deep sense of conviction, and urgency; when she expressed herself in matter-of-fact statements that exacerbated her mystery. Always, there was a glimmer of desperation in her eyes, as if she wanted to make him understand. But she wasn't the sort to elaborate, so he had to ask what she meant.

She hesitated and bit her lip. Her uncertainty always made him feel helpless. He knew she felt imperiled - caught between the safety of silence and the need to be understood. "I don't feel real," she said, "No one can have me because half the time I'm not real, like smoke dissipating within the physical frame of my body. I'm caught behind the obscurity of my own haze...it's no good you trying to keep me, or get closer to me. I couldn't get closer to you even if I wanted to."

He didn't know what to say. He feared moments like this when his skill of persuasion failed him. The girl seemed to know this because she wasn't looking at him expectantly. Finally he said: "It's as if you fill the crevices of my existence with some ungraspable force, as if you permeate my emptiness with yours'. Only it isn't really emptiness that you evoke. You're more like a weightless, forgotten creature that I ardently seek to excavate. Sometimes you fill me with my childhood desperation, when yearning was beautiful... You know, when I was little I wanted to be a cloud collector. I thought it was a simple matter of climbing the highest mountains and reaching up to pluck the tufts of clouds, all kinds of clouds - storm clouds, dawn-tinted clouds, clouds that looked like sheep's wool..."

The girl looked at him intently. "You agree with me then? It's no good trying to be with me. I'd only infuriate you without meaning to, and it would be an endless frustration without catharsis, a false promise."

"You don't understand," he said, "it's the impossibility of you that transfixes me. Your transcendence compels me. Perhaps you will forever be beyond my reach, but I'm like you, helplessly caught in the dreamworld".

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.