I live inside my own head, save for the moments when no one is around. I am the howling wind in the night. I am free myself and freeing to others, if only they will accept me. I keep the swift company, have long conversations with the air, and dance in the cold shine of stars. Sometimes I feel wings beneath the skin on my back, longing for freedom and light, yet my feet still touch the earth just enough to keep me sane.
Still, my world seems to not be like others. While they gather in groups – listen to music, talk, interact – I find myself lost elsewhere. Silence is my language, touches and gazes are my words, though I have yet to make them strong enough to reach another being. I simply leap into my world and fall there as long as my breath and my life will last. When I do slow down occasionally, my physical sight is still blurred at the edges - like a burnt piece of parchment. I sometimes imagine I am peering out at reality from the shadows, through the shadows.
Yet even through my hazy vision, there is a boy I see in the park sometimes. Our auras spark whenever we cross paths, as if there is something important I should realize about him. Lately, my mind has been sore trying to figure out what it is, so I have to lay the thought to rest now. In the meantime, I watch. I notice those things about him that are different from me, yet the same. The look he gets when he stares at the sky or at the grass, that unfocused look of one who is utterly focused – it reminds me of myself.
I once saw him at sunset, when the last light melts like blood being swallowed. He looked about, searching to see if there was anyone around. Then, at an admirable speed, he scaled the nearest tree as high as he could, twigs and branches barring his way to test his worthiness. As if determined to prove just that, he pushed on to the upper limbs and chose a comfortable spot as his reward.
His jacket was ink-black as his hair, and from it he pulled a single hardback book. Adjusting himself in the nook of the tree and partly hidden by the dense leaves, he leaned against the trunk and read. A soft smile rested on his lips and he absentmindedly patted the branch next to him in thanks. His bangs blew back with a passing breeze as he was lost in whatever he was reading.
I watched him for the good part of an hour, as time has no meaning to me. It passes sometimes slowly, sometimes swiftly, but in those moments it seemed to barely move at all. The world disappeared around as I imagined what he was thinking, feeling. Not even needing to close my eyes, I felt the light-shadows cast by the leaves rustle on my skin; I heard the whispers of the branches as they sung a lullaby. The smooth power and age of the trunk on my back made me sink deeper into the life of the tree, to press my cheek against it and share happily in all its memories. A huge longing swelled within me for both him and for what he was enjoying.
Gold light from the dawn’s first rays was thrown on my face as I rushed to the public library the morning after. Birds were barely singing yet it was so early. Even flower blossoms scolded me and told me to go back to bed, scoffing at my insolence. I stuck my tongue out at them, letting their words go unheeded. However, I ended up having to wait until nearly noon – the library does not open early on Saturdays. I spent this time peering into the world of the dew drops collected on the bodies of the winged lions laying outside the library doors. The eyes of these creatures expressed great wisdom, yet also true empathy. They were the best listeners, and yet their conversations made me both think deeply and laugh lightly. Paws crossed contentedly; our bond was like no other I had ever known.
When we were not listening to silence, I stroked their grand stone manes and thought to them how ridiculous words were.
I told them how I didn’t understand words. People depended on them too much, I said. The lions agreed in unison, twitching their tails without movement. I went on to explain how other senses can be used instead, such as touch and sight. Why say, ‘I love you’ when an embrace can convey the emotions it would take a thousand words to describe? Plus, I added, words can be empty. Words cheat. You can say, ‘I’m sorry’ and not mean it at all. The lions nodded their heads quietly and interjected their own thoughts once in a while.
I leaned against one of the lions’ flank, pressing my face against the cold marble. Images flooded into my mind from the stone and the sights it had beheld – of grandparents, children, everyone aged in between. Laughter echoed on the walls, the very building itself. Past occurrences and emotions were all etched into the library which was lifeless without them, yet with them truly alive.
See, I sighed happily, it would take hours to explain that in words.
When the doors finally opened, I breathed in awe at the familiar scent of pent-up knowledge, of a million facts and images just waiting to be accepted. I wanted to be accepted too, so I skipped down the aisles with my eyes closed and waited for something lonely to need me.
I did not wait long. My feet suddenly stopped in front of a shelf, fiction section, young adult. A book titled, Fly With Me loomed in front of my face, calling sorrowfully. I reached out tenderly, answered its call, embraced it tightly to my chest as a bright smile spread across my face. The Librarian who helped me check out must have known how much I wanted to read that book, as she scanned, stamped, and handed it to me faster than I had ever seen anyone before. I admired her grace and speed as the book pages fluttered in her hands, and smiled at her on my way out.
I showed the lions my new friend, and they silently growled in appreciation. I was delighted at their approval. My feet – or were they wings? – carried me swiftly to the park, yet I stopped suddenly at the sight of him already there. I hesitated a moment too much.
You want him, yes? I asked myself.
Yes. More than anything, I replied, absolutely sure.
Then you have to greet him. Use words this time. Remember what they are?
Vaguely… I don’t want to though.
Why not?
I have a feeling – that maybe he’ll understand, even without silly words.
He’s not like you. No one is like you.
I know. But can’t someone be similar?
Hmm… I suppose, I reluctantly agreed.
I forced my feet forward one at a time, convincing them repeatedly that they needed to move. My eyes were so focused on the ground that I nearly ran into the tree in which he sat. My head jerked up, my mind jolted. I could see him up there through the branches and leaves – a spot of black among emerald and russet. I looked down again, not sure if I could really approach him. Even if I could, would I remember how to talk? It had been so long. I felt now that the only word I truly knew was my name.
It was hopeless to think that he’d somehow look down and notice me here. He was too deeply into the book, too entwined with the tree. I wanted to call out, but no words came. My mouth was open; the words my heart wanted to say were blocked by my mind. In the end, he was hit with a small pebble and finally looked down. I registered in his senses, and he descended the tree in fluid movements. Who is he? I asked myself. He was halfway down the trunk now, leaping to the next limb and disturbing the silence. The last few branches he skipped, and hurled himself earthward, sending tremors through the ground. They reached me loud and clear.
They said, I am the homeless, the forlorn. I am the moon that throws silver and sighs in harmony with the rustling of trees. My dark side is known, but cast out and rejected. I keep the silent company, I lay with the wind and hold the life-force of the sky.
They said, Do you still want me?
I approached him. Yes.
He looked at me. What do you want? his expression asked. I was about to take out my book in answer when I looked at his eyes. More specifically, the color of his eyes. They were gold… no, honey? Amber? Some bright, pure hue. Their radiance matched that of the moon, the light they gave off was comforting yet brilliant. They held flames inside of them, the colors in those irises leaping and twirling like the heartbeat of the wind. My own heart fluttered and twitched oddly. What was it doing in there?
I looked down at my chest, but I must have appeared bashful to him, because he took my arm and led me to a bench under the tree. He opened his mouth to speak.
“Who are you?”
I tried to reply, I really did. I knew the words I wanted to say - I remembered them! But they refused to come. They crammed and stuffed my throat so tight I could not squeeze even one out. What a fool he must think me, with my mouth gaping open and my hand on my throat.
“Are you mute?” he asked. It was close enough to the truth, so I nodded.
He leaned back on the bench, his posture straight and strong. He tilted his head up to the azure and white above, the wind playing with his hair as it danced by. His expression was peaceful at first, but as time passed in unknown amounts and he sank deeper into his own thoughts, that quiet face of his twisted into an agonized expression. He clutched his shirt near his chest with one hand, and used the other to steady himself on the bench. Turmoil inside him was fighting to get out, but he wouldn’t let it. He held it back in a way that suggested weariness, experience, and regret. The moment passed.
“Can I tell you something?”
I nodded slowly. I was so happy that he would talk, that he did not just get up and walk away. I watched his chest rise and fall in a deep breath, and then... he spoke. He talked long and hard, the syllables rushing up from inside him, relieved to be in the open at last.
These were not his exact words, but this is what I heard. The sun and the earth had rejected him. Those that made up his sides, those that had shaped him through his life threw him out because he had wobbled in his orbit one too many times. His mistakes were the reason they had told him to leave. He was banished to wander in empty space, to suffocate. They didn’t care! He was lost in life. Buildings loomed over him, and streets led him only to dull brick walls and countless dead ends.
Right now he camped in his friend's backyard, and he worked at a store across the street. Any extra time he had, he would come to the park, talk to the trees. They listened, and they sympathized. He said that he could practically hear them growing, feel them understand him, see how they rooted for him. Go! they would encourage in their endless chorus of cheers. He and his books would be here for hours.
When he spilled out his life to me, I took every sentence, every feeling, and stored them away. I was eternally grateful, even though I knew I wasn’t the reason for this. There was nothing special about me that had caused him to talk, it was simply the pressure of the words inside him. I was just here right as they became too much. Yet, I was still ecstatic to be the one able to listen. Perhaps it was the reason that he didn’t know me, that I was a complete stranger. Perhaps that he thought he’d never see me again, and who cares what someone outside of your life thinks about you?
When he finished, he was panting, but his heart seemed a little less burdened.
I touched his shoulder lightly, and he grabbed my hand with startling quickness, staring at me with sorrowful gold eyes. I pressed feelings towards him, I shoved any compassion I had his way. He got my message. He saw the comfort I was desperately trying to give him and he accepted it.
“Thank you.”
No, thank you, I wanted to say.
“Do you come here often?” he asked.
I nodded in reply.
“I have to go to work. Maybe I’ll see you around?”
I smiled. I hoped my smile said, I’ll look forward to it.
Time again flowed by in its endless river, the ripples and pace of which I do not keep track. Every once and a while I would stop being the hot winds of the desert, carrying sand and dust. I would pause on the icy tundra, dropping the snow and ice shards I held. I would run through the tepid, the mist, and the overcast into the rain of green light. I would cause the grass blades to kiss each other, give voice to the trees dotted about. I would swirl around, looking for that boy in all the places I'd seen him before.
Sometimes when I did this, it would be at sunrise and I would have the yawning light flowing through me. In other instances, it would be the middle of the day when I usually hesitated at the fierce sun piercing through my being. A hundred times it seemed I did this, in a thousand different atmospheres. All I found was a glimpse of his fleeting presense.
My wanderings grew meaningless as they increased in number until an evening when the stars winked above, and the dark sky floated weightlessly over everything. The moon cast light, and in doing so called forth shadows. One of these shadows was violent, throwing its weight around in anguish and pain.
Grass threaded through my toes with every step I took and wind flooded the night. I saw him raise the small knife he had. I watched as he hacked away in rage at the tree he deeply loved and cared for. But the tree was not the source of the anger. No, the fury came from within. A void stood in the center of his chest, one which I could clearly feel even far away as I was. It was suffocating him, pulling in all security and hope. The air there was stagnant, there was neither silver light nor dancing whispers. None of his comforts were present - the emptiness had stolen them.
I wanted to help, I wanted to reach out and blow the sadness away, heal the pain. Yet how can you treat a wound you know nothing about? I could only watch as he and his shadow dealt frantic scars to the thing he adored, probably the thing he loved most in his life.
I stared with my most penetrating gaze, trying to pinpoint the exact cause of this. I was suddenly aware of time, I felt it like never before. It was rushing from all sides, it frantically told me to hurry. The time was fleeting, there was not enough of it. If he were to go on, where would his rage take him? He couldn’t be allowed to sink any further – he couldn’t.
The cause seemed to have been narrowed down to two things - his current self or his past self.
He didn’t know where he was going in life as of now, yet wasn’t he content? The serenity as he sat embraced by the branches, that couldn’t be faked. Though he was poor, though he had no family or home that society could accept, he had one that did something more important – accepted him. His current self had found a place to belong, a life worth living. So he wasn't angry with his now self - this rage must transcend time.
I didn’t know what mistakes he had made in the past. I felt I needn’t care. As each of my footsteps took me closer to his figure – consumed by rage past the point of thinking clearly – I realized I could die in a few seconds. I knew nothing about this boy. His level of insanity could go well beyond mine and it would be too easy to kill me or rape me and walk away. It was night, we were all alone, and I doubted that I could even get a scream to come out of my mouth.
And yet, as I weighed the risks of approaching him and not, I realized that I could not afford to walk away. I felt that if the flame within him was put out, I would surely die with it. So I did what none other should do, and what I shouldn’t have either.
I could hear his rasping breath. I could see the moonlight glinting off the sweat beading on his face. His eyes were lost inside of him, the gold irises dull and unaware. I touched his shoulder in the exact place I had when we first met, and he jolted, turning on me.
I expected to think, Will I die? But instead it was-
Will he die?
He was startled, and I knew my mistake straight away. It was not good to startle someone wielding a knife and half unconscious. The blade swung my way, and I saw my own blood silhouetted against the moon.
The book that was previously in my jacket fell next to me. Fly With Me now laid on the ground, flattening the dew and grass beneath it. Meanwhile, he stood over me, panting, with his face contorted and terrifying. I wanted to scream, I wanted to run away. Terror was pounding in my ears and if the courage from the trees and the wind hadn’t swept through me in that moment, I might have fled. As it was, the roots just underground seemed to help me up, and I soon stood facing the cause of both my fleeting fear and my eternal want.
A rivulet of blood ran slick down my cheek, and yet I held out my hand, also stained. Blackness and pinpricks of light fell upon both of us from above. Our very souls were blown by invisible currents, not seen but understood. Moon and wind, both insane, one free and one breaking free.
Bewildered, he stared and I matched it. The knife slipped to the ground and so did he, yet on his knees he still took my outstretched hand more gently than I thought possible from the same person who was who he was just a moment ago. He pressed the offered hand to his face, and his tears washed away the blood.
We will work, said the wind to the moon, together. You will show me how to wake up more from my dreams, and how to use those silly things called words. I will teach you to forgive yourself, and to dance without regrets.
The moon replied, Yes, and shone with a radiance not possibly expressed in mere words. Rather, he told me his willingness through tears and a night spent back to back, reading by moonlight in a scarred but forgiving tree.
Why does that happen so often? People always seem to start reading at the worst or most awkward part possible. It's really irritating.
DD
Book titles should be italisized, for a more professional look.
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