23 :: landing harmlessly ::
[posted 1/22/01]
It’s late now and it’s begun to snow. She looks up into it and smiles; sometimes the world is beautiful. She’d heard on the radio that eight to ten inches were expected, and she has tomorrow off. What she’d really like to do tomorrow is get up early, go down the street to the tiny park, and play in the snow. Run around like crazy and slip and fall and land harmlessly in the powder. Safely. But she knows that she’s twenty-two— an adult —and that once you’re an adult you don’t get to do that again except maybe you get to when you have kids except for then she’s certain it’s different, then she’s certain it feels one layer removed. And, thinking on that, nothing seems beautiful anymore; everything seems cold and gray and she wonders if that’s the way that most people see everything all the time and if she’s just weird for sometimes seeing it that other way, that way that she can’t seem to hold onto for more than a few seconds anymore. Then she feels knotted up and wants to cry.
Every time she has ever tried to explain these feelings to her parents or counselors or well-meaning boyfriends (even Johnny) they have always said that she is "depressed," as though these flaws and faults start out inside her and only then seep out to taint the world; no one has ever just agreed with her, agreed that terrible things happen to people, to us, and that the proper response to that is to feel small and sad. No one has ever just agreed; she has always had trouble trying to figure out why. She’s lately given up on trying to explain the feelings to anyone.
She looks down at the garbage on the street. A crumpled bag from McDonald’s. We love to see you smile. Fucking shit. A circular draincap set into the sidewalk holds a curled-up six inch length of leftover Christmas garland. It looks like some freakish spiny centipede, curled and dead. She remembers once in high school, during gym class, finding a dead rabbit in the high grass at the edge of the outfield. When she was younger she’d always loved bunnies and had wanted to touch them (she can still remember stroking the rabbitskin lining of a pair of her mother’s gloves, the precise nature of that feeling); when she found this one in the grass, almost perfect, some glassy structure of fascination rose within her; time seemed to slow down, the rest of her softball team disappeared, along with the game itself, the stupid mesh of laws and moves and reason that created some ghastly abstract thing that everyone seemed to agree was important, and she was crouched down next to the rabbit, touching it with two trembling fingers, gently, as though it might wake up—
—What the fuck are you doing?
—Nothing. Nothing!
And she gave away the secrets of her past and said "I’ve lost control again." She doesn’t want to think about that anymore. She doesn’t want to think about anything. She wants to disappear. She gets the keys out of her pocket and walks to the front door.
Further Reading ::
Rethinking Micropayments by Dru Ora Jay ::
