Day After

No...not that kinda of day after. Get your minds out of the gutter, you know who you are. It is now the day after Valentine's Day! I would like to give my congratulations to those people who became engaged, or promised to each other. Also my condolences to those who were dumped on the most "romantic" holiday of the year.

I am also posting a part of a free write we did in my expository writing class. Our assignment was to write a story that was as if we were coming back to a very special spot after a long absence and we were not physically alive, we could be ghosts spirits or any other type of mythical or fantastical beast. We were also to describe with a sense of a wide focus and then coming in close. we were to bring out the poignancy of being somewhere special that we couldn't really go back to ever again.

I am going to preface my writing with a small description. I had a wonderful teacher in kindergarten and first grade. She had us describe what the inside of out minds looked like. she described hers as a house with a huge garden where ideas grew and inside all the rooms she stored memories and certain rooms had locks where secrets were kept. My mind apparently looks like a castle as you will see. In my story I described the world in my mind...


The real world goes like this, we create for ourselves a little patch of perfectness. We live our lives out in the world the real world but all the interesting things occur in the inner world. We create a system and a home for our knowledge and experiences that no one can enter but ourselves. I am gone from the real world and as I yearn to rest I am urged to return, just for a moment to my own mind, the inner sanctum in my interior world.
I float back through fog and purple mist to a valley surrounded by peaked mountains crested with crispy glaciers. I glide along the down the mountainside over the evergreens and alder leaves to skim the valley floor. My passing is unmarked unseen, the game birds along the river that meanders across the wide bottomed valley aren't flushed to flight. I am fleshless and substance-less- all that is left to me is a consciousness. The lone being to mark my passage is the shadowy watchman who waits for my return. At the opposite end of the valley is a small rise where a fortress gleams.
I float toward my sanctum unsure of what I will find there. I had lived out my "real world life" and neglected the inner. The outside had been a shell crumbling from the inside out, and no one had noticed.
I came to the gate and I reached out...I forgot, I no longer have a body. So I pass through the thick wooden panels that make up the gate and enter the courtyard of my mind. There is my fountain of youth, still burbling away. How I long to feel those cool droplets against my skin once more. The fish are long gone, their splashes no longer joining in the song that once filled this space.


This piece is unfinished and hopefully I will take the time to finish it...