A kerfuffle

11 Sep 2010 1 Comment

by Katherine Anne McCluer in Creative Writing

Like a. as a. a.

Simile simile metaphor.

I was riding on the bus earlier today and the seats felt low. I felt the skepticism of the other passengers as they scrambled around from blue-grey seat to blue-grey seat to try to see the street signs because the seats were so low. They felt like they were falling. Falling away from something, from their created realities, from their osmosis of themselves and society; those low seats made them feel way too low, and I watched them scatter around like confused birds.

I felt safe. I felt safe watching everyone else panic in my low seat. I felt safe and at home in my warm coat, just riding the toasty warm bus to what felt like a mystery world. It’s my castle. I’ve created a fortress and there is not one single person on this bus that can find me out, or see what I am doing. I’m sitting here, watching people, which is what I do best, and I feel beautiful and warm sinking into my low, low seat, looking up out the dark windows, the windows that can’t be seen through, because I’m just too low. The dark windows with the lights running through them make me want to imagine I’m going somewhere magical; not just going; flying. I’m flying somewhere magical; but my mind won’t focus on where; all I know, is that its somewhere safe and full of wonder.

And this is me.

I am prone to end up in the tightest ball possible, in the darkest corner in the room, peaking out to see what I can see. See if I am any of what all of that other stuff is.

And that’s me.

This is falling out of me. This is falling out of me and I’m running around picking up these tangled pieces of underlying message all the best that I can. It’s hard to grab every single piece; because I keep forgetting that I’m real. There’s always something underneath; some emotion, or truth, that lies just beneath; or maybe even a great distance beneath. Or maybe it’s just that we wish there was.

Because if what’s on the surface is all that there is, then please, kill me now. I couldn’t take another breath thinking that what you see is what you get.

I keep swaying back and forth between thinking I’m worth everything to thinking I’m worth nothing. It’s a hard way to do it, you know, with no obvious equilibrium. But still, the way that I vowed to do it years ago.

The moon sometimes looks like a half cup of tea; the way that I learned in some science class, that when liquid lays in a glass it never lays flat, there’s always a curve; it always turns up at the edges; just to the slightest degree. The half-moon looks like a cup filled with tea that has it’s edges turned up…and the smog of light above the curve looks like a blur of warm steam; and I honestly believe this is one of the most beautiful things I could ever see.

I say I too much.

My mother describes herself as masculine because she believes that emotional freak outs and break downs are in her own words “stupid”. She says that she could live her life doing nothing about anything; and if you’re going to cry you should do it quietly.

I just felt that it should be said; for whatever it means.

How am I going to develop a story out of these observations? I guess; is the question I keep asking myself. I need…I need a plot. I don’t want it to be easy to think of a plot. It’s definitely something I need to pull out of myself…pull out from the deepest part of my core; and spread it around like butter on toast with beautiful words that I learn from the thesaurus.

I think it’s interesting when you run into people you haven’t seen in a couple of years and you slowly figure out what each other is doing with the world and then you can see their eyes start to make judgments. Or perhaps you are just judging yourself; or they are judging themselves on just how much you are judging them. Or maybe nobody is judging anything; and all this is just made up. Whatever it might be, I think the idea I am choosing to speak of is whether our value should be chosen by what we end up making of our lives.

I need a new paragraph; because I am not sure I’m doing a good enough job describing this; since it was yesterdays feeling; and this is today. A whole day’s worth of new thoughts and emotion are clouding my head; blocking it from accessing the full beautiful truth that is yesterday’s memory.  I’ve been deciding lately whether doing a so-called “nothing” with your life is not the same as doing a so-called “everything” just with a different connotation. I’m sure that when somebody becomes a heroin-addict that it is a full time job for them; and it affects their mind and others minds; and the lives of so many around them. So how is it that you go about making your life worthless? I don’t think you can. I think you’re stuck. I think I’m stuck. I think we’re stuck. We’re going to make an impact whether we like it or not and there’s just no way out. And that’s my real challenge. It’s not living that gets me; or maybe it’s living; maybe it’s this one singled out part of living that really really gets me. What is my impact going to be? Should I try to have control over this impact?  If I don’t try to have control over this impact; will the impact satisfy me? I just want to know what I want to impact; or if it’s worth impacting anything.

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