2004-08-13
Something Ordinary Into Something Extraordinary
hearing: Glorious #1 - Remy Zero
reading: Candide and Other Stories by Voltaire
feeling: exhausted and devoid of eloquence
Admittedly, I have been writing very self-consciously the past few weeks. Perhaps a full month or more. I've been withholding more than half the things I've wanted to say, in apprehension of whether I should really be letting the reader base I have, read those things about me.
My entries have, consequently, grown shorter, less frequent, and I have just plain been unable to write. Because I am too worried about how other people are going to handle things and react.
This has gotten to a ridiculous point. I can't write on like this. This is going to become a habit of my writing. It's going to become another one of my historical, regrettable blunders. My writing is going to deteriorate into vulgar ostentatious rhetoric. It's going to be very ugly.
So I am going to test putting a stop to this. Today, I am writing as though not another soul in the world reads this. Today, I am not going to care who is reading, and who is not. I am going to write. I am going to write to make myself feel better. I am going to write to chronicle, to remember. I am going to write for myself.
I lay, tossing and turning in a feverish sleep. Having fallen asleep sobbing heartily, my dreams were penetrated and manipulated by the chronic heartache.
As the dreams worsened, my mind gave up trying to maintain its restless unconscious sleep, and I jolted half way awake.
I blinked at my clock which I eventually ascertained as reading 5:14am. Just what it had read the night before when I woke up. I groaned and flipped over in bed, putting my back to the clock, and I began clawing at my face and hair.
My mind, still full of my unhappy dreams and still unwilling to awake all the way, gently instructed my hands to pull away from their destructive occupation, and led them to my nightstand to slip out a humble, messy pencil box.
It's funny how love transforms the homeliest, most ordinary of objects into almost sacred treasures. A piece of worthless junk becomes gold. A few clumsy words from the beloved become beautiful poetry.
Harriet with her scrap of cotton wool and stub of a pencil from Mr. Elton kept in a box labeled "most treasured possessions". Mr. Brooke with one of Meg's gloves in his pocket. Marius with what he believed to be Cosette's handkerchief. Caressed and treasured possessions of literary characters from three rather famous books. All trifles, especially Harriet's, but transformed by that strange light, for they had belonged to the beloved.
And so it is with my box. Dirty and beaten, having been my younger brother's, it is still treasured and dear, filled with poems and missives worth gold to me. A box filled with beams of melancholy sunlight.
I flicked on my bedside lamp and blinked against the light painfully. Turning it off and on until my eyes adjusted to the blinding light.
I tremblingly opened my precious little box. I extracted a couple specifically chosen papers and pored over them. Carefully folding them and placing them back in the box when I had finished. Then carefully closing the box when all had been read and painfully felt.
I flicked the lamp back off and stared at the box a moment, my mind still filled with the words I had just read.
And I broke into song. Whispered and silent in a despondent manner, a humble, child's nursery song. As I quivered out the last words, reflecting on the meaning, my voice broke and I fell to sobbing again. As I had before I slept. Violent and silent, shaking dreadfully.
I finally quieted down when my sobs became mingled with coughing and choking, my breathing hoarse and raspy.
My box had not left my side the entire time. As the last tears fell, I drew the box into my arms, and clasped it to my breast, close to my heart.
I held it tightly to my aching heart and it felt like soothing balm.
A box.
A box of papers.
It was my comfort.
I tossed and turned, slowly falling back asleep, but with the box in my arms the whole time.
Once, my sense shrieked loudly and I tried to pull the box away from myself and put it back on the nightstand.
My arms were like lead and moved slowly. As the box moved farther from my heart, I felt like my heart was being stretched and severed in two.
I cried out in pain and drew the box against my heart again in an instant. I sighed with relief, snuggled it, and fell asleep.
Ah yes, before I forget, Cyrik wanted me to mention the existence of my shoutbox (which I still don't quite see the point of having). Under the main image there, the link which says tag. Cyrik is posting up a storm, and getting lonely because no one else cares about it. Oi. So I don't know...go... chat amongst yourselves I guess...or something...
PostScript: Psssst...If I got a notify list, would anyone sign up for it? Would any of you find that helpful? Since I eradicated last five... You'd get an email from me every time I updated...Good idea? Bad idea? GIVE ME INPUT!