Monday, January 2, 2012

Bus stops in big cities

Sunsets remind her of traveling.  It's the only time she ever sees them.  She has watched the sun rise over barren midwest lands, cold and tired from endless work.   And she has watched the sun unfold over majestic peaks of an endless sea of mountains, the alps spreading on from Austria and moving into switzerland, second by second being unveiled as the sun draws back the curtains of night.  On a ferry slowly meandering the inside passage she watched with excitement as the rarely seen rising sun lit up wild lands that few men, if any at all, have placed their feet.  From the window of a train heading north, a car heading east, from the window of a plane orbiting the earths circumference she watched the sun hang in the air for hours, refusing to leave it's post as she passed London, Greenland, Iceland (setting, not rising), wanting her so badly to see it all it refused to leave until it had illuminated everything on her journey.  And even here at home, while waiting for the bus to take her to her suffocating 9-5 position, the sun gleams it's yellow light on this simple street where she lives.  Perhaps she can learn to travel at home.

A year ago

She needed to be alone.  It wasn't that anything bad had happened.  She hadn't had any fights or break-ups, nobody had died, she hadn't been estranged from her family.  But still, she needed to be alone.
Her life had gone from simple nothings to extreme everythings.  People, work, travel, school, more people and more work and more travel...  She loved it all and she reveled in it and it had overtaken her, overwhelmed her, tired her right out.  She was exhausted and warn.  Thin.  She had learned and changed so much, had given to others and taken little for herself.  She had morphed and now she barely knew herself anymore.

It was time to be still.  To listen to her thoughts.  To wright them out over and over again, so as not to miss a single noun.  It was time to be still.  To do little and be intentional.  To do the things she had always wanted to do.  To play piano and paint pictures and ride mo-peds.  To watch documentaries and listen to books on tape.  To watch movies in bed.  To watch them twice in a row just because she liked them that much.  And to cry in them, just because they moved her that much.  That would be a big deal, when she let that first tear drop well up in her eye, become so full it flooded the brims holding it in place ad slid over the edge, like a suicide victim sliding over the slim edge of a roof top to their last few fleeting moments of bliss before their imminent death.  It can be scary to show how you feel, but exuberayting to learn.

And in these silent walls of someone elses life, she would reinvent her own.