My Life

I used to feel as if I needed this, as if it was my only way of stretching out my self-pitying hands to ask for help. I’m not entirely sure what changed, why it changed, or what caused it to change. Perhaps it was an emotional change, like a pendulum beginning it’s accent toward total happiness. Or was it that I don’t feel like it did anything for anyone, including myself, and I lost a sense of purpose? Why? How? What?

Whatever the answer, I feel like I’ve lost a desire to write here. I’m happy, for now, honestly, and I guess that’s what matters… Or is it?

Look at me now- no elegance, no mind-blowing ideas, nothing that dances off the page. Just myself, thinking aloud, to a sleeping audience, wondering how I can wake them, or myself.

She sleeps. I watch as her breath inhale and exhale in a showmanship of monumental beauty, unparalleled by even the most famous landscapes, paintings, novels. There is the final flicker of a smile flowing off of her lips and hitting my soul like the colors left behind moments after a sunset. She is mine, and I couldn’t be any more lucky.

My head hits the pillow, I feel her roll over and put an arm around my body. She knows exactly what I want, or perhaps she just wants the same things. Sometimes, perfection is too much to be put into words, and that is what I currently feel. How can I, a peasant of his kind, receive the love of her, a princess? The princess who will one day be my queen.

Do you have even the vaguest conception of what it is like? What it is like to care for someone with such fervor, such amplified emotion that it becomes an ultimatum? To find someone so perfect for you, you know at first slip that she’s the one who is right for you, and that life would be drastically unfulfilled without her?

She has become my life, my meaning, my love.

I stare at her, peacefully sleeping next to me, and I smile… For I am the luckiest man alive, and she couldn’t make me happier than this.

My body sways, ebbing and flowing in and out like the tide of some foreign sea, crashing on the beaches of my life. The wooden chair creeks, providing a melancholy melody which echoes throughout the imperfect acoustics of the garage. The tone calms my blood, the blood which flows at a pace mimicking the rocking chair. Am I the rocking chair?

My fingertips gently slide over the stain of the wood, the stain which has been weathered over the years and begun to fade. I watch as it fades more, as my fingertips take a new strip of finish off, so easily impairing this paragon of craftsmanship. I rock back and forth, the gentle creek still ringing in my ears while the smell of wood dances throughout my nostrils. The chair is a part of me. I am a part of it. Which part, I wonder?

My right leg brushes a piece of wood as the chair pushes forward minutely further than what has become the average. I feel the hairs on the back of my leg rise, a gentle breeze makes them feel like grass shuddering in an open field. Still, I rock, and feel, and am.

I stand on my own two feet, and look around for the first time in two hours. The room is empty, aside from me, aside from the chair. I reach down with my hands and pick it up, this piece of me, this entity of my being. It is heavy, I feel my muscles straining to keep it lifted. I walk toward the wall, and raise the chair above my head. I throw it, as I release it my arms celebrate in relief. I watch it hit the wall, bits of wood shatter like glass hitting a tile floor. It has not broken, but exploded. Splinters shoot throughout the air, hitting my face and body. Then, all is calm.

I walk away, open the door, and leave the shattered chair behind.