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Wind

Wind whispers through the small crack between the window and the wall and enters the warmly lit apartment. It skips all over the kitchen chairs, startling the cats, and cackles with merriment as it passes the whirring refrigerator. The wind plays up and down through the whole kitchen, brushing the coffee mugs, the kettle, the toaster. It moves on into the open living room, investigating the television and blowing dust into it and making the leaves of the plants sway slightly as it brushes them.

The wind keeps going and moving and flowing through the house, shying away from the hot heater and making odd noises as it rattles the doors in their frames. It soon reaches the cold bathrooms, and leaps up the walls to fill in the very corners with it’s cool cruelty. It brushes the cold taps and dances across the mirror.

Eventually the wind reaches the only room with any noise in the house, just a second or two after it began its investigation of the place. It cools the face of the teenage girl in her room, reminding her that she is alone in the house, alone apart from the kittens and the wind. The wind ruffles her hair and then escapes through the window behind her. It has learned a mood, a house, a person, a home, all in the space of a few moments, and it will keep darting across the many houses and apartments, and will keep gathering emotions, feelings, sights and sounds.

Forgetting Spring

Imagine a great, big tree. Grand and majestic, an old soul, it carries thousands of small leaves, leaves that fall each winter to the ground and scatter in the wind. Each fall, as the leaves begin to change colors and one by one fall from the branches, the tree begins to feel lonely. It knows that soon it will be bereft of all its cover and will be alone. So every fall, the tree grows sadder and sadder until, as the first frost kisses the branches, the tree feels dead and alone.

The months of winter whip the tree into a fierce skeleton of its former glory. All leaves gone, the tree is left without support, without cover, without anything to shelter if from the winds and snows and the rains and the frosts. If the tree could have a voice it would be howling with pain as the wind beats through it, screaming as the cold drops of rain hit its branches or moaning softly as the snow buries it under a cold blanket of wet white flakes.

The tree never remembers during the winter what it feels like to wake up in spring. But nevertheless, every year, there comes a morning when the tree feels the warm glint of the sunlight on its branches. It drinks up the water from the wet ground through its roots and seems to stretch out as the warmth thaws it. Soon enough, the new leaves start budding, one by one, and the tree would be smiling if it could, greeting every new bud with a drop of water to sustain and nourish it.

It’s hard to remember sometimes that spring will come, but come it will, whether we know it or not.

Substantial Lack

Silence and emptiness are odd things. Both represent a lack, and yet they seem to be so substantial that you can acutely feel the presence of both.

Silence can fill your ears with its noise, making it deafening. Silence can drive you mad with the pitch of it, with the hum of it, with the absolute roar of it. You may shake your head to clear your ears of it or cough or make a noise so as to erase the presence of it. Sometimes it helps, and you’ll notice the creaks in the building and buzz of electricity and be calm, but sometimes the silence will press right back onto your mind, squeezing your head and almost hurting you with its tightness.

Emptiness can fill a room to the brim with the odd ache it causes. Sometimes it can fill a house full of furniture, making you feel utterly alone despite the things around you. Emptiness can weigh heavy on your heart and soul like a stone tied to them that is plunged into the ocean, pulling you into its depths and making you almost gasp from the need to be rid of it. You might go out into the street, run somewhere to meet friends, anything so as not to feel the aching emptiness, and it might work – but sometimes the emptiness will fill every space you reach and you won’t manage to disentangle yourself from its claws.

So strange, how lack can be so real, almost touchable.

Metal

Every time is like the first time. Palms shaking and sweaty, heart pounding away in my chest so loudly that I’m sure everyone can hear, my face getting red with fear.  The gloved hands approaching my face, that long needle covered in plastic drawing nearer and nearer. Just like every other time, I screw my eyes shut tight, and hold my breath.

Pain, exquisitly sharp and focused, as the needle goes through the skin, breaking it completely. Another burst of pain as the needle is taken out and the metal bar is put in. Until this moment, it is all the same every single time.

But after… Well, after is a different story. After the piercing process is done, I can breath a sigh of relief and smile, looking at the newest metal piece in my body. I carry the dull ache of the new hole all day and the days that follow, but it doesn’t bother me so much anymore, because I’ve done it before and I know how to deal with it. It’s the fear of the pain that makes those few minutes on the piercer’s table so awful every time.

My total count is now eleven, three in the face, eight in the ears. Eleven is a good number.

Insert-Thriller-Novel-Name-Here: Preface

Most stories begin with a person. Some stories begin with an object – an enchanted ring, a lone chair in a meadow, strange stuff like that.

This here story begins with nothing. Not an object, and not a person. It begins with absolutely nothing, that is to say, just a vast, empty space, all contained inside a small test tube. The test tube is full of nothing. Vacuum. The absence of matter – all matter, liquid or solid or gas.

I sat there watching that emptiness and I tried to understand it. Tried to comprehend the meaning of total, utter emptiness. I couldn’t really understand it, no matter how hard I stared at it. This was when I was a young boy, seeing  vacuum in the science lab for the first time.

Now, I feel as if I am facing an uncomprehensible loss, and now, as it was then, I’m staring at what is in front of my eyes and I cannot understand this emptiness, this lack that I’m facing.

How could I have gotten myself into this situation? How have I screwed myself over like this? Not for the first time, I wish I could turn back the clock…

I spend all my time between calls at work scribbling in my notebook. I was going to try to write some dialogue because I must practice that, and instead I wrote a weird preface to a cheap thriller novel about someone who’s lost everything due to something or other. Ah well, the creative mind takes us odd places, I suppose.

Popular Haunt

Every small city has to have at least one spooky place. We have ours, alright. Oh yes, we do. As girls, me and a couple of my friends actually went into the single abandoned and, of course, reputedly haunted house. We’re alive to tell the tale, amazing as it sounds.

The house is truly creepy. It is set back from the street, and you have to climb a long set of winding, falling apart, stone stairs that are cut right into the wall of boulders that the house sits on. The stairs are overgrown with weeds, stinging plants and thorns a necessity. When you reach the top of the steps, there is a locked gate, and climbing over it is quite painful, the plants getting in the way constantly, and the gate is so rusty that your hands come away caked in brown metal shavings.

Then there is the house itself. The story goes that the architect – or sculptor? – that lived there just moved away and left the house to decay and no one knows why he didn’t sell it, because it’s big. The creepy thing is, it used to be rather clean inside. The house is completely empty, and is very like a maze – there are two separate wings to it, and the only way to get from one to the other is by crossing through the balcony. The tap in the kitchen is rusted shut, and the doors are all gone or creaking slowly in the wind that moves through the house. There is even a loft, its stairs mysteriously gone, and no way to get up there.

My friends and I sneaked in there a few times when we were younger – even at night once or twice. Sadly, over the years it has become less spooky and much more a place for teenage drunkards to crash. It is now full of people’s exceretians, spray paint and even a couch someone had the strength to drag up there, and it has pentagrams and funny drunken messages painted on the walls. The creep factor is there, but now it is more “Ew, it stinks and some drunk guy will attack me” rather than “Oh god, oh god, I swear this place is haunted, I swear, I swear!”

Friday Afternoon

So peaceful, so quiet. The buses don’t work and most people are napping, leaving the streets free of smog and full of children’s laughter and noise. Many kids are on their way to the Scouts meeting. They’ll be noisy once they really get started, but they’re still quiet, in their own building, not yet scattering across the park and playing.

The light has grown dim early, as it always seems to do on Friday afternoons, and there’s a cool, almost chilling, breeze coming in through the slats of the window. There is something so odd about the quiet. Just when it starts to feel eerie, though, a car whooshes past and reminds me that humanity is still there, life is still moving around me.

A sense of calm prevails over every other atmosphere. There can be nothing urgent on this afternoon. Time doesn’t really mean much right now. It feels like the sphere of this point in time and space is just an endless, calm, quiet thing, stretching on until forever. The ticking hands of the clocks betray the lie to that feeling though, and I sigh.

Tearing my eyes away from the spot they’ve been fixed on aimlessly for the past five minutes, I need to give myself a little shake to free myself from the cobwebs. I need to get back to reality now.

Panoramic View

Standing at the edge of the yard, beyond the pool, beyond the odd bust of the Indian chief, right in the flower garden, trying hard not to step on the precious buds, is a girl. She’s wearing a short t-shirt and hugging herself against the cool morning breeze that ruffled her sleeves and her long hair. She closes her eyes and smiles into the morning sunlight, feeling glad despite having slept only a handful of hours.

When she opens her eyes again, she really looks, really stares hard at the view in front of her. So strange to have a yard end and have the wilderness begin right after the fence. The valley stretches out below her, and she gazes at it intently, trying to see wildlife – a few deer perhaps, a coyote. As usual, she sees nothing but the shrubs and trees and the vast greenness of the hills.

At last, she raises her eyes beyond the valley, beyond the hills, to stare at the tiny patch of blue, slightly darker than the sky, that is right there in that little break between the hills. The ocean. Sometimes she can even smell the salt-air from here, despite being miles away.

Eventually, she’ll walk in her bare feet back into the house and have breakfast with her family, who will all be waking up early due to jet-lag, just like her. That first morning of every visit to Los Angeles’s beautiful hills is always like this – magical.

Seeing Red

For a moment, the heat rises from the very tips of the toes all the way to the smallest nerve-endings in the fingertips and from thence to every part of the face. The heat rushes through the veins and tendons, searching out every muscle that can be flexed and made taught. For only a moment, all this happens unfettered by thought, by reality, by anything except the pure and unending rage.

In the one, pure moment before thought, the body is entirely out of its owner’s control, ruled by temper and animal instinct. But for a moment only. Muscles taught, blood pulsing wildly, hands clenching and unclenching, the thoughts nevertheless rise to meet rationality, reality and morals. The rage fights to be heard, to be let out, and while the body might lash out, hit, rend, tear and scratch, it will now be done with the knowledge of what is right, what is wrong, and what hurt is being inflicted because of the temper.

Rage and Temper – two harsh masters of which we all would want to be free. Alas, they are part of our natures. It is only that in some they rise to the surface more quickly, while some are lucky enough to have them lie dormant most of the time.

The Meaning of Life

42.
Har har.
The meaning of life is to find the meaning of life, so when you’ve found the meaning of life, you don’t have a meaning to your life anymore.
Har har.

The truth, as far as I’m concerned anyway, is that there is no meaning to life other than what we make of it. Life is something we’re in all the time, we cannot step outside of it and look at it objectively, finding in it some grand pattern that is the meaning of it.
The meaning of life is your first kiss, your first love, the way your mother looked at you in second grade when you were on stage, the way your brother helped push you on the swing, the way you feel in your best friend’s arms, your favorite coffee brand, your habits. The meaning of life is how you cried when your grandfather died, how you withstood the pain of your arm breaking, the way you toiled to get a good grade, a good job. The meaning of life is your dog barking when you come home, the trivial anger at someone shoving in front of you in line, the way you rant about the things that you’re passionate about and the way you save money every month to be able to pay rent. The meaning of life is LIVING it. What else could it be?