Misty mornings that melt into nowhere. Foggy streams and dewdrops on the leaves. Trees murmuring to themselves. Ancient tales, magic herbs, spells and lore from ages long lost. Laughing children, musing women. Broken glass and concrete.
Unyielding nights. 24-hour diners. Sunken eyesockets, purple and bruise-like. Combat boots and safety pins. Eyeliner as dark as coffee. Relentless car rides, jarring music, open windows, city lights. Concerts until the wee hours. Sweaty bodies, writhing pits. Chords and beats that rattle your bones, vibrating up from your collar bone, causing your teeth to chatter.
For her, summer lies somewhere in between childhood and adulthood--an odd gray area where the only certain things are late nights and early mornings.
Keep your hearts nailed to your heads. Keep your hopes lofty. Keep your eyes glazed and wide. This is a time to run barefoot and blow bubbles and believe in dragons and light candles and make wishes on stars. Because, really, most of these pretty things will be gone as soon as the leaves grow crisp.
Oh, so many books to be read! Her shelves are full, her eyes are sore. But how wonderful it is to have things to read.
The pinnacle of her summer reading revolves around a certain swashbuckler by the name of Edmond Dantes, but most of you know him as Monsieur le Comte d'Monte Cristo. Tall, somber, and all that is dashing and dark, our entrepreneuring earl seems a static figure through the layers of years. He is unchanging, yet constantly evolving, sinking through the fabric of time like rot through a fleshy fruit. For in his eyes he holds the promise of revenge, the insanity of imprisonment, the pure heart of a sailor.
The girl insists you read this heavy gem of a book, for hardly has she come upon a book so grand, so impossible. It leaves one rather breathless. What else can be expected of the Napoleonic years? An unstable environment makes shifty, extreme characters.
She gives it 5 hearts. ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
Apologies for the lacking of posts. She promises that there's more to come.
There are fruit flies in the house; they're secretly pesty fairies in disguise, seeking shelter from the rainy outside. It's been raining a great deal, and the flowers have been coaxed from their hiding places. In the mornings, the sky mists over in a tearful fashion.
The streams are sweating, fogging incessantly. The fairies tell of summertime. It's time to hide a holey stone beneath the door. She doesn't think she can stand anymore fairy-flies.
Cities are big, tall things with many eyes and streets for legs. They don't scare her--not one bit! They loom over the horizons, lurking and silent, and hold secrets close to their bellies. They seem cramped, overcrowded, but upon investigation, there is enough room indeed--
enough room for kites to get lost in trees,
enough room for cupcake shops on lost alleyways.
And also matutinal runs in sprawling parks. She's going to be swept away again, she reckons. The windy city won't leave the mind easily.
She is too living a parcel to be packed up and stowed away in the corner. That kind of treatment is left for broken toys and old ladies. Not yet.
There is a sincerity to her walls; no one but herself put them there, and now she defies them, scraping her fingers, flesh to cardboard. She is not plastic.
She screams and writhes and cries out, pushes and cranks.
It's time to wake up; It's time for bed.
Enough.
Where is the girl with the smile? Her return is overdue. Look, for outside, the world lives. Spring alights gently, softly, casting a green cloak about the snow. There is no such thing as plastic.
She wanted to sink into the city. There is a sort of transparency here, a luminosity; the trees are gray, as blank as doves, and alight. They are bony and balding, their little snippets of red and orange hair hanging by tips. Roads seem to sparkle in the dim fog. Now the mornings are like weak coffee, dark and without substance.
Driving through the night with him, she thought that the car ride mustn't end, not here. The fall is too glamorous, the landscape too greedy for souls, the wind far too quick and the car interior far too heavy.
Fall brings all sorts of little memories to call. The smell of leaves ushers in visions of blanket tents, the dawn of early runs in the prime of high school days. Everywhere the world is calm and in hiding, idle thoughts the only live beings in this dying world. But yet, it is pleasant; there is a joy in this season.
She wants to watch this movie. Badly. For some reason it seems seasonal and appropriate. There are unicorns and fond times of mothers baking fall treats, and ponderings of where the wild things are.
She turned her ankle in a Cross Country race and got to ride in a silly little golf cart. It's only a little sprain--a wee, tiny one. She never thought that she'd miss running a race so badly. It was a hard thing. But life is full of all sorts of hard things, and lessons can be learned if one is true and wise.
This brings about a decision for thinking on. Shall she continue to run, or be swept away to the city?
She's home now, too, for a little while. Nothing so much has changed; it doesn't smell like fall here. Winter came prematurely. She likes the smell better in her apartment in the south-land. She also misses her prince.
She's also decided that dear Edward Scissorhands must be a very sad and lonely fellow indeed. His story made her eyes sting with salt and think of crystalline walks on silent winter evenings. And if she should ever have liked an old-man actor, she would choose Vincent Price. At least he likes cookies.
Oh, do smell that?
The house is beginning to come alive! The musty corners are fretting and retreating; mother has made pumpkin pie. Tonight there is also noodles and sauce, bread and faux sausages. Little by little the sun creeps away and the pumpkin-orange decorative lights turn on. The branches outside are shivering, shirking.
There is a coziness here, one not present in the girl's apartment. There is a serenity, a monotony. Instead of the old man that lives upstairs and goes to work at 5am, there are cats mewing and an early-rising father. The latter are far quieter and a little more sympathetic to sleeping ears.
She has missed the simple, heavy joy of returning home. She shan't get used to it for long. Tomorrow she will be whisked away again in a silver car. Home, never change.
Ever.
If there ever was a constant in one's life, it must be in this house, she thought. It must be here, tucked in the far north-land, in a wash-out suburbia with sidings the color of dishwater.
Here is a place for the stories in my head--the endless little tales of wicked woodlands and conflicted gentlemen that waltz their way into my daydreams.
