I happen to love winter. I feel at home in the cold, bundled up in a warm jacket, drinking hot cocoa. Snow in Kentucky is beautiful, and blue jays are everywhere. I haven't seen a cardinal yet, but I'm sure one will pop up in my line of sight somewhere around January when it starts to snow.
I also love how winter leads to spring. Everything pauses, the trees, flowers, and wildlife all included, in lieu of reaching high to the sun to grow. Nature itself hibernates. It pauses to allow its citizens to reevaluate, if you will, their position in this beautiful world of ours. I've learned to appreciate the inclement weather here. I know there's a purpose for the dreary dismal days when rain drizzles down, never really ending. It's to keep us alive. If every day were sunny and warm, we wouldn't appreciate it as much. Most school-aged kids learn that here. A snow day every now and then is a welcome break, but when you have an unexpected week off from school, you don't know what to do with yourself. The occasional unexpected peace can be the biggest blessing of all. This beautiful season gives us a break from the mundane. One day you will walk outside in the sunshine, and two hours later it will be dark and rain will be pouring from the sky. It gives me an excuse to stay inside and spend time with my family, even though I, like every other teenager, pretend that they're annoying. Winter gives me an excuse to say I love you.
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Every once in a while a feel a shiver up my spine, as if my body is aware that the feeling of a thousand pins and needles, just creeping in a rush up my back, will make me remember the thousands of intense emotions I’ve felt at so many different times. It’s like my subconscious knows that when I get goose bumps I automatically think of scary things that aren’t frightening because they’re creepy (spiders, for example,) but scare me to death because they involve emotion. No one I know would call me non-confrontational, but I know that sometimes I detach what is going on around me from my emotions, and that’s a scary feeling that is a bad coping mechanism. It’s what I use, though. I don’t know how to change it. I lock all of the feelings away in a deep chamber of my heart, and allow them to slowly trickle down into my soul if they’re dense enough to run through my mind first.
Then I overflow. I won’t let myself do it around anyone else. I have to cry my own tears of breaking my very motivations apart by myself and you can’t be a part of that. But that’s only a lie I use to keep myself halfway sane. Of course you could be a part of that. I’m just scared to let you in. Isn’t that the greatest paradox? Being scared to be alone yet being frightened as not to let anyone too far into your heart? Maybe that’s not all a bad thing. Those who I hold dear to me know that I mean it when I tell them I love them, and they know I’m serious when I tell them they’ve hurt me. I think it is best that way, after all, so we don’t dwell on any pain. Yes, it exists. Yes, there is no escaping from it. No, that does not mean am going to waste my life away composing great sob stories in my mind in the key of C-minor. No, get rid of the dissonance, or at least ignore it, and enjoy the melody. After you do that, then maybe you’ll be able to learn to appreciate the bumps along the way. Sometimes people cut you without meaning to, and that doesn’t make it hurt any less. Sometimes people leave you and you don’t have a chance to tell them you love them. The conversation you last had with your dearly departed will be scalded into your memory forever and you will wish that you had said “I love you” one last time. You will wish you took the opportunity to reach out your arms into their warm body and give the simplest gesture of an embrace. Sometimes people leave you and you watch them deteriorate. You have to part with someone lying there but they can’t be gone soon because you can see them and hear them and feel their hand in yours. But after all of that, you are left with melancholy and you must learn to live with the empty places where those very special people left. That’s what makes harmony, after all. Two things close together, but far enough apart that they don’t sound horrible when played together at the same part. I think that life and death are a fourth apart. I think that is the hardest harmony to hear. A fourth is just far enough apart to where you have to really concentrate on it to understand where to sing next or you will be flat, and fall back onto the happy thirds of memory. No, you have to grow as a person, and develop more complex and beautiful sonatas all by yourself. Sure, they’ll include others, but even the most intricate chords have to rest in the background and let the melody work itself out. That’s how life is. We have to figure the real part we learn from for ourselves. I want to live in a castle perched on a hill by the ocean. This castle wouldn’t need to be extravagant. It could be as big as a double wide trailer for all I care. I just want to be able to say that I live somewhere everyone would consider beautiful. I don’t’ want it so that others will stare. I just would enjoy being able to help the world enjoy the beauty of something hearty and natural, forged as if it were part of the land itself. I want to hear the sea breeze softly whistling past me, swirling my skirt into a flurry of frenzy. I want to have a Marilyn Monroe moment; for to catch myself in the swirl of yards of something warm would be the finest feeling. I want to reach down and touch the ground, and not only feel soil, but feel soul and life. I want to understand that the soil is the basis of the trees, which lend themselves to our very existence, and of course, our observance.
I yearn for the pure beauty of the shore around me, just so far away as so you would have to work to touch it, so that you have to walk a block or four to breathe in the ocean mist freely and to feel the sand squishing in between your toes. It would be worth all the walking to me. After all, if there was no work to achieve beauty, we wouldn’t be able to appreciate it as we should. Sometime I’d like to reenact one of those music videos, you know, the ones where a woman wears a long, flowing white dress, and simply relaxes and watches the sunset as the colors mellow together in a beautiful symphony. I’d enjoy lying back to back with the warm sand curving to me, while the sweet echo of some light music in another language drifted downward just for me. It would seem like a fairy tale to me. The feeling of being enveloped by such beauty must be overwhelming. For one day, I would like to be overwhelmed. I’d like to confuse my senses. My brain wouldn’t know whether to concentrate on the light fragrance of the flowers surrounding the coast or the strong crash of waves as they hit the rocks down the coast. I’d like to confuse my skin into thinking someone beautiful is holding me while it’s just the sand. That way, everything stays light, and sweet, and innocent. That way this wish will stay pure and young and lavish in such a frivolous way that no one could confuse it with that of an adult. An adult would have to worry about the rent in such a historic site, and ponder how many more germs there really are floating around in the humid atmosphere above them. If I just remove the idea of getting older, then maybe it will never happen. But then again, out of sight, out of mind, is one of the worst philosophies anyone has ever thought of. I just wish I could go back to when fickle subjects didn’t matter and all I cared about was searching for some truth in this mess we all like to call life. Maybe if I could be by myself, I could grow up the way everyone suggests. |
AuthorTwenty-something kind-of-adult woman trying to navigate her future, her calling, and her God. Archives
August 2017
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