just text

An hour and nineteen minutes into a day stretching ignorantly into an obliviously lengthy future, I’m waiting on a program to
run – just, run, damn you! – and let my head sink into its ‘relaxed’ pose: cocked slightly to the right, angled towards my left. In direct line of sight is a whiteboard I’ve mounted, but never used. A smattering of reference papers (“Return Reason
Codes…) and self-important notes begging for attention (“Call Amy! 000-000-0000”), but above and beyond them, an understated expanse of white which begins to call to me. Perhaps its just the ridiculously upbeat overtones of Belle and
Sebastian’s’For the Price of a Cup of Tea'(“If you want to know the truth / Her friend the stars dripping from the jewelled sky…She can finally be the person she wanted to be”), or maybe its a lack of sleep, coffee deprivation, or something similarly mundane, but I find my mind heeding the whiteboard’s furtive whispers, and all of a sudden, everything looms large.

My gray threaded cubicle office widens beyond the normal sight I’m possessed of and gives way to white, all white, as my body- and something deeper, depper – falls (simply falls!) into the small two-foot by two-foot whiteboard which I know just shouldn’t be able to contain me, but there I go! It is, in this moment, the window I had never too-seriously hoped for. Standing atop a cliffface, I’m overlooking the endless sea of land dotted with budding forests, rising and falling breaths of hills, and creeks running in the direction I’m facing – which the rising sun on my right tells me must be North – as though racing each other to see who can get farthest away from the cliff first. Wind whips around my face and seems to challenge my right to stand here, right here, and brings to bear a cloying scent reminiscent of Rome and its proud, old trees. Sia’s voice howls around me, “Just breathe,” and then holds. The world becomes silent and I close my eyes. Without fear or the hesitation which common reason screams would be wise, I close my eyes and spread my arms. I’m suddenly aware of the world slowing down around me in its silence, my heart beats, and the pulse sallies forth through my veins and I feel it like I would a
shockwave, flowing down through my body to, yes to my heel. As though it were a powder keg and that wave of sanguine energy the match, my foot explodes into a minute expression of inertia, released. My toes gain strength and inch upwards, my foot pushes against the ground it was, seemingly for eternity, married to. I’m cognizant of a sweet sense of freedom, of flying, of becoming.

“Just breathe.”

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