I wish…

Darn it, I just love my friends so much, and [*insert effusive, rambling emotional post about how amazing and smart and goofy and unique and nerdy and beautiful they are and how amazing they've been in my life and how grateful I am for them and how I don't know what I'd do without them*] I am way too happy to go to sleep right now, even though it is four minutes to one o'clock in the morning.

[Untitled] I'm not entirely sure what this is.

(Other than three hours of lonely-like ponderous imaginings and Death Cab For Cutie.)

~

     She was standing before the window, shuttered though it was, when his knock came on her door.
     There were stars in the sky, turning their faraway faces towards them as she opened her house to the road.  His silhouette was dark as his hair, and as sleek.  He crossed her floor on heavy but light feet—soon she would call it a widow's walk, and some unspecified time after that it would be forgotten.
     Together they smelled of sand—of shifting foundations made for dancing and stumbling feet, of fragile castles soon worn away, of fanciful dreams soon washed out by high tide.  Heat still flushed visibly across them, in sunkissed streaks of ochre and thickly forested freckles.  Eyes were damp, with perspiration too warm to dissolve into the air, and perhaps with the visceral knowledge of all they must forego.
     They faced each other; they slowly grasped one another close for a long, last moment:  imbibing the scent, the feel; patterning their memories with the texture of their summer.  Breath was their song now—long and heavy, as if they lay on the verge of sleep.  It was a final closeness, and they reveled and sorrowed in it as one.
     Carefully, then, they began their work.  They sat in the near-darkness, set their hands on shoulders first.  Sometimes their own, sometime one another, perforating and folding, loosening and disencumbering.  If they exchanged words, they were so quiet as to be nearly indiscernible; they may have meant everything, or nothing at all, in this static hour of reality warped by transition.
     They stripped all memories of one another from their corporeal selves, the laughter and joyful energy slipping off of them as rain from a waterfowl's wings.  Their limbs slowed and steadied, the hot aroma of sunlight settling on them in new earthy tones, pinioning them into regularity and necessity.  It flaked off them, it peeled off them; every once in a while it would bubble and crack, and the wisps of heat would escape, unwanted, into the night.
     What else escaped with it?  They did not dare to ask, lest some unnameable beast pounce on their doubts from within.  Everything they was "they" was shivered off with fingers sometimes tearing, sometimes stroking.
     Time had followed close on their heels, as it followed in every Season.
     After an hour, they stood, dressed in burnished, tender pink, looking pale and rosy against the sloughed-off image of their yellow-red-brown summer skin.  The dim firelight cast reflections of their new incarnations, the selves they now belonged within.  Their feet set comfortably against the floor, flat-footed instead of tip-toed.
     They were always told not the anticipate the emptiness of the Autumn.  They were always cautioned not to look into the eyes of the encroaching twilight until they were on its verge—always warned that to cast a shadow over the Summer, over the noon, was agony and sacrilege.
     Why was it sacrilege to ache?  She wondered it aloud.
     He had no answer, and their new skin was too tender for him to reach for her hand.  She knew by the bent of his head that he shared her mind in part, that he might yet share it beyond this night, even if she knew nothing of it, even if he understood it not himself, even after no trace remained of "they" even in dreams.
     How long would it take until they forgot?  —It was a cycle that did not end.  Better for them to enjoy the moment while they were within its brilliant, dazzling, exhilarating embrace, and take the grief when it fell like they were human anvils.  it would be over soon enough.—   She could not even recall if there had been anyone before, if summer existed more than once in a lifetime.
     But why was it sacrilege to ache?
     —Had she ever asked this question before?—
     The light that burns at the heart of summer—it is to know, and to risk one's heart anyway.  Never mind that it chafed, never mind that the glasspaper would sear it from her eventually.  Let the smell of sand linger, even mingled with the smell of salt for a time.
    Let her feel the end coming, and love despite it.  Let her strength be for something even just for a blink of an eye:  a splash of dark, cool color burning across the ever-gold sky.
     No.  The thought to reject it, for a moment, passed through her, but it was swiftly gone, ephemeral in the hard-nosed wave of tradition and habit and the entropy of the world that already overtook them in the face of the change.
     Long minutes he and she sat in the dark, staring into eyes that had sooner been portals for the world, for the microcosm of a soul, and now were slowly draining of their intimate double edge.
     If the love lodged somewhere within them, they would not know it until the end of all things.
     At last he and she slept, and when morning came, her winter skin was firm enough that she could go about her day, and there were only tiny shavings of freckles and snippets of gold on the floor, already falling through the minute cracks in the wood grain, to show that he had ever been.

~

17 March 2012

Sometimes there's nothing like writing about the propensity for epic and tragic angst of fictitious people to make you get over your own self-pitying delusions of utter mediocrity.

It's my last night as a teenager.

I'm listening to Florence + the Machine and The Postal Service and United Pursuit Band, and finishing the (extremely) rough draft of my NaNoWriMo novel, and attempting to assist my mother with her laptop's technical difficulties even though I'm not very computer-savvy (on PC's, anyhow) for my generation.

I spent the morning playing Oblivion (I leveled up so many times it's ridiculous.  Even Elijah thinks I'm ridiculous, and he has no place to call me on this).  The Demske girls and I wandered a used bookstore today, which was great fun even if we didn't make any purchases.

I don't know what I mean to do tomorrow.  Dad's taking me to dinner for my birthday.  I'll probably wear funky clothes and chill and play video games and write poetry and have a one-woman dance party while the others kids are at school.  Do some serious soaking.  I know I want it to be a very Jesus-filled day.  Maybe I'll do other fun things, yet to be determined.

I'm positively shocked that the weather was so nice today.  I'll be downright flabbergasted if it's even half as nice tomorrow.  Something about March 8th always pulls rain from the heavens, which is great, except that it means i've always got rubbish weather on my birthday.  But it will be good.  It'll be a good day.

Hopefully, I won't be too horridly sentimental about turning twenty and Being Really An Actual Adult Now, and I'll try not to wax overly philosophical.

Guten nacht, mein freunds.

…I was so exhausted this morning that I fell asleep twice over my physics homework and could barely eat brunch.
…Now it's 1:11 a.m. and I'm not tired in the least.
*wails in frustration*

In other news…
SPRING BREAK.
Ten whole days!
I don't know what I'll do with it yet, besides write, (and do homework,) and try to get together with amazing friends, but I am utterly determined not to fritter it away.  'Tis going to be fabulous.  It really must.

The facts are these:

1. My friends are utterly and wholly insane.
2. My friends have no shame in glorying in their complete nerdiness.
3. I have spent literally two solid hours on Facebook following the same three threads and spending brainpower on absolutely nothing else.
4. I have barely laughed this hard in weeks.

Conclusion:  I HAVE THE MOST FANTASTIC FRIENDS IN THE HISTORY OF TIME AND SPACE.

http://www.facebook.com/TheShotzky/posts/3175970952672

Moor (Or, a metaphor. which rhymes.)

I'll take you as my lover, out upon the moor;
We'll dance in the turnings of unbroken skylit grey,
Safely jacketed for now in freedom's glistening allure:
Until flushing high and golden rises fiery midday.

I'll take you as my lover, in the dusk and dawn,
When the earth is in the shadows, purring lost and low,
And everyone is absent, all knowledge foregone
Until the sun sends one above and you below.

I'll take you as my lover, the arms to be my treasure
The wuthering bleakness our bed for thought
Aside I'll toss my thoughts of you, without credence whatsoever
I come to you again when all my soul's eclipsed for naught.

I'll take you as my lover, and never see another
As long as my eyes are shut fast against the wind.
Your flame that never touches me to suffer
Wreathed in mist, darkly our days forever limned.

Now I take you as my lover, out upon the moor
With the stars locked out of sight and mind
And the changeling unblue skies our only door.
And in the summer of our love, unrefined—

I'll flee you yet, my lover, for the hundredth time:
And when you see me fairly crowned on the mountain's height
Forget that what saw me through the winter cold was fine.
Hands are the sure making of both the wrong and right.

Autumn makes you still my lover, you who pose no "why?"
Your shape never falters from its tranquil, wild arts.
And the spring is cold, my lover, between you and I
No sun can draw around us, only show our frosted hearts.

- : -

  [20 January & 11 February 2012]