Sep 17 2008
1:22AM
I stumble down the path, one foot in front of the next trying to find my way home. I realize that I don’t know where that is, but my feet continue moving, searching for a place that doesn’t exist. I’m lost.
I watch as a girl walks by me. She’s wearing short jean shorts with bright red cowboy boots. I glance down at my watch, it’s 1:22AM. She glances back at me in fear, I try to imagine what is going on in her head. She’s terrified that I’m going to follow her. Her hand reaches into her purse and she puts a crooked finger on her can of pepper spray and prays to an unresponsive God that I won’t touch her. She sees that I’m still walking in the opposite direction and loosens her grip. I bet she won’t let go completely until she walks into her bedroom. I look at my reflection in the glass on the building to the right of me. I’m wearing tight girl jeans with a bright purple shirt. “So this is what all of the murderers and rapers wear nowadays,”I think to myself. I begin to understand her paranoia.
I look toward the trees and wonder how they came about. A small seed planted into the soil, over time it grows bigger and bigger branching off into a new direction with each passing day. What are those branches reaching for? Answers? I stop walking, reach up toward the sky mimicking the tree, searching for the answers I know won’t come. I look back at the tree in pity and wonder how long it has been waiting like that, in that exact pose.
I look back toward a building. It amazes me that something so big comes from the thoughts of an individual man. It makes me smile to think that something can make me feel so big, yet so small at the same time. The building towers above my head, it’s at least 15 stories tall. I stand next to the pillars which support it, the pillars which hold it up and ensure that it doesn’t collapse. “Why don’t I have pillars?” I wonder in my head, “I’m more likely to fall apart than that building is.”
My feet continue to walk, I wonder where they are going. I walk into my dorm building, enter my room, and sit on my bed. I still feel lost. How can one feel lost in the only place they have ever truly considered home? I look out my window and watch the people staggering back to their rooms from parties. I wonder if they feel lost too.
I look next to me on my bed. I wish I had somebody there; someone to hold, to feel, to love. I think of the last girl who was lying there and wonder where she went and why she left. I begin to wonder if I scared her away.
I look out my window and see a group of flowers underneath the street light. I see myself in them. Spring comes every year and they bloom for the earth; showing off their beauty and making love to the spring air. With no warning winter comes, murdering the flower and every ounce of passion left inside of its wilting petals. It freezes, too broken to cry and too dead to move. But still, it sits around and waits.
Spring comes again, and without hesitation it blooms just the same as it did the last year. So fragile and so full of hope, so eager and so slow to learn.
When will the winters stop coming?
