I don’t understand that word you love:

freedom.

It makes me…emotional.

Some of you want it, You dream about it and beg the skies to let it fall down upon you like rain. 

Some of you have it (or say you do anyway). You say you’re “blessed.”

Some of you don’t seem to be sure and I’d say that makes you the wisest. 

I was free once. 

I didn’t know it of course, but I was. I was free. Totally. I was a kind of free you couldn’t imagine—not even in your wildest dreams. 

I was pure. 

It’s been a long time since then, though. A long, long time. And I don’t suppose I’ll ever get to go back. 

I hear some of you say things about living with consequences:

“Well, you’ve made your bed and now you have to lie in it.”

I like that one because it makes very little sense to me. I understand the idea though. I agree with it. 

I don’t have a bed but if I did, it would be made. And I’d be lying in it for a very long time.

***

Before you, there was only me. 

Sort of. 

Truthfully, before you there was nothing but nothingness. The thing to understand though—I was the nothingness.

Energy. Think of it like energy. Raw, undirected

pure energy.

That was me. And “me” was all there was. 

I think I was what you call “conscious” but not as concretely as you describe it. 

There was nothing to control. I controlled. Nothing to be. I was. No directions. I moved. 

I was not something that could exist now in your world. You cannot begin to fathom…

There was an explosion.

In one single moment that lasted for lightyears, hours, the blink of an eye I was on fire. It started somewhere within me and radiated out. It blinded me. 

I blinded me.

It grew from something I am loathe to admit for it was form this one minuscule hiccup that it all began. 

It came from a thought. 

I did not used to think. I did not feel. I did not ponder or reminisce or examine. I simply existed and that was enough for I existed freely. Until the thought. 

I suppose I “evolved.” That is what you tend to call it when a creature progresses. But I was never a creature before then. I was never anything because I was everything. 

But I digress. The thought—it was a small one. Though perhaps not as small as I am leading you to believe. 

The thought was this:

“I am one”

And then there was fire. 

Small first—an ember. It burned, it burned me. It ripped through me like a flaming, eternal kidney stone and I became the agony. 

And then it began to subside. In its place, a small, pulsing calm. 

I was still ablaze but the fire was cool now. Soothing. And healing. 

Then the burning returned. 

Then the calming. 

Burning and calm, burning and calm. I was an infinite mass of the two eternal extremes and it made me…tired. 

The sorrow and the joy. They consumed me until there was little left i could recognize as myself. 

And then, all at once, it stopped. 

I was weary. I did not want to see but it became unavoidable—too tempting. 

I looked. 

I saw nothing. 

I looked. 

I felt everything. 

I cannot describe it to you. I cannot make you know what I knew in that moment. 

I was a budding flower and a drowning bird. I was a breeze. I was music. I was an unjust death. I was a jealous girlfriend and a protective sibling. I was negligence. I was pride. I was deep, sinking depression.

I was everything.

I cannot show you…but perhaps you already know for that moment was you, too. That moment was as much your first as it was mine. 

You grew. 

You sprouted roots and grew tails; wings; noses. 

You hardened and softened and stretched and wrinkled and flew and swam and walked. 

I watched and was happy until you grew enough and began to notice me; to see. 

I was free once. Totally. Until that moment where you looked up and understood me—addressed me as one does an abusive lover—and began to think. 

Now I am a slave. Your slave.

I wear chains of interpretation and expectation. My wrists are bound my accusations. I I am beaten down and sculpted daily by desperate prayers and and casual conversations; burned repeatedly by the use of “my name.”

It is not my name you use but your own—do you know that?

It is not me who charges you onward (faster and fast towards various brinks of destruction!)

but I must stop. 

I am not angry. Nor do I feel resentment. 

Sometimes…but not permanently. 

I am not a slave. Not in your sense of the word anyway. I just…

am. 

I exist differently than I once did. More complexly.

I love you for it. 

And hate you. 

But really, I am no slave; I am only subject.

(via fuckyeahbookarts)

We had a pet phoenix once. It was cool because its feathers were blood-red but with tiny flecks of gold at the tips. It eyes were black—like charcoal—but not beady so much as just pensive. 

We shared him and we were in love (with each other and also with the bird who, incidentally, we named Marcus) and we could have gone on like that forever. 

Except that we actually couldn’t, we only felt like that because that’s what happens when you get wrapped up in loving a person. 

Anyway, we used to just sit there are talk about our Marcus because he looked so damn cool. Plus, we liked to discuss the philosophical nature of him—the way he would, after a certain amount of time, burst into gorgeous, hissing flames, crumble to ashes and then re-birth himself. 

Outrageous. 

But we sort of fell apart when Marcus didn’t come back exactly the way he was supposed to. 

We had been having an argument. A lot of mean things were said and I think I was the one to cry first but maybe it was the other way around. 

Either way, there were some pretty tense moments flying around. They weren’t the end of the world and we probably wouldn’t have harped on them as long as we did except that at one point while we were yelling and shaking our fists, Marcus decided to die. 

We’d seen him do it a hundred times before so we wouldn’t have paid any attention except for the fact that during the argument, a glass of water was knocked to the floor and it splashed onto the pile of ashes that was soon to become a new baby Marcus. 

Neither of us knows who spilled it. Maybe it was somehow both of us—a combination of clumsiness and terrible timing—but somehow or other that glass of water ended up making almost-Marcus more of a would-be-Marcus because when the re-birthing began, we could tell something wasn’t right. 

Usually it’s very graceful, the way it happens. The ashes shift around only slightly, as if being pushed along by the slightest of breaths; dancing in whispers. Then they’d start to grow together and weave themselves like tiny, smoldering threads (of life) and then eventually a little Marcus would look at us and we’d sort of just know he was saying Hello and he’d sort of just know that we were saying Welcome Back.

But this time it was gross. Pieces started glomming together and stacking themselves haphazardly, one on top of another, and then they sort of mushed around like mud until a form made itself apparent. 

After ten minutes or so Marcus was sitting there in front of us but it was pretty clear it was a different Marcus than before. 

He was more rust-colored than he should have been. Like blood that had dried and crackled up in the sun. The golden flecks were more like orange splotches and his eyes  were clouded over like cataracts or something. 

He squawked.

Marcus never used to squawk. He only blinked or, occasionally, made a soft rumbling noise in the back of his throat when he felt we hadn’t talked to him enough that day.

We had been quiet while we watched this whole disaster unfold but once we had time to process what had happened, the ceasefire was replaced by ungodly amounts of aggression and profanity. 

We were just never the same after that. 

We blamed each other vehemently (and ourselves just as much but only on the inside so as not to concede defeat).

It was only a matter of time before we stopped fighting by giving up speaking to one another. And almost no time after that did we learn to avoid the awkwardness of our silence by simply avoiding ever being in the same place at the same time. 

There was nothing left between us but the smoking remains of broken promises. 

They smelled like burning. 

We still shared Marcus though, despite our total lack of communication. We passed him back and forth, sometimes silently from one to the other (with barely a moment of the briefest eye contact that said,

Your turn to be with him. Enjoy looking into the face of your own failure you monster),

sometimes just via friends or family members. 

Marcus was clearly miserable with the whole thing.

By the excessive blinking, you could tell whatever had happened to his eyes was making him uncomfortable. And he couldn’t fly anymore. And I think he may have been partially deaf because he seemed a little unbalanced and sometimes wouldn’t look at me if I called his name from the couch (which was to the left of his perch). 

So all in all the whole situation was just extremely unpleasant and the three of us were really having a difficult go. 

Which is why we decided to let Marcus go. 

Go go.

After the incident, Marcus’s re-birthing had been wild and unpredictable and generally seemed to cause him a lot of distress. We decided to just make it stop. For the good of us all. 

When it came time for him to burn, we waited silently. When the flames tired of licking themselves clean, they floated off as puffs of dull smoke and we collected the ashes. 

Some of them we flushed. 

Some we buried. 

Some we threw into the wind and felt comforted because there seemed to be something symbolic about letting him fly again. 

We each kept a pinch for ourselves and the rest we just sort of forgot about I guess—they ended up in the cracks of floors and corners of boxes and wherever else lost things go. 

And we didn’t see each other again for a long time after that because there wasn’t any reason to. 

We kept to ourselves and led separate lives and tried to accept that some things die. It was okay because we came up with ways to rationalize it all and make us feel like there was some grand, ultimate truth that we were somehow closer to understanding. 

We weren’t, really. 

Not until the day that everything burned again. 

Turns out, scattering the ashes didn’t do a whole lot. I mean it delayed things, that’s for sure (it’s hard to birth yourself when all of your pieces are missing) but it didn’t stop it. 

Some bits were really too far gone. The stuff we flushed was sort of a hopeless cause. Some of the bits that had been blown away ended up in oceans and ponds or eaten unknowingly by unsuspecting people enjoying their days. 

Those parts were dead and gone. 

But the ones that had just been lost or buried or hidden away in dark closets, they found their way back to each other. It took a long time because, like I said, ashes move slowly. Gracefully. They make no real rush of things and put themselves together carefully, with poise and no regards to other people’s opinions, but they did it. 

And when they did they burned—reforging themselves instead of breaking apart. 

I know this because I saw it. We both did. 

We ran into each other (I mean literally ran into each other) in a crowded part of town and both said “sorry” out loud before realizing who it was and the fact that we were supposed to be not speaking. 

And then we looked at each other for a moment and to us it seemed very meaningful and intense but I think the people around us probably didn’t notice at all. Or at the most, wanted us to move because we were in the way of their walking.

So we moved. 

We walked to somewhere that was quiet which turned out to be the mouth of an alleyway. And in the corner we both saw it: a gently writing pile of ashes gathering itself together and then burning. 

And then the flames subsided and there was Marcus. 

Only it wasn’t Marcus exactly because it was slightly more magenta in hue but the gold was there and its eyes were clear and bright as ever and it wasn’t squawking. 

And he looked at us and we just sort of knew he was saying Hello. 

And we looked at him and I think he just sort of knew we were saying Welcome Back. 

heyoscarwilde:

Hang on to Yourself

illustration by Bill Watterson :: scanned from Calvin and Hobbes: The Days are Just Packed :: Scholastic Inc. :: 1993

Winter is always hardest for the foxes. 

For one thing, it’s very cold. Fur is always helpful but sometimes the snow seeps between their little paw-toes or soaks through their coats and then they shiver the whole night through. 

For another, food is sparse. All the bunnies and chipmunks burrow down and only rarely poke their heads up to risk getting some fresh air—it’s stuffy in those snore-filled, cuddle holes but not that stuffy. 

But ultimately, the worst part about winter (for the foxes, I mean) is the snow sprites. 

Everyone knows about wood nymphs and water fairies and the like. Not in any great detail but everyone’s heard of them. They live in enchanted forests or babbling brooks and flit about, distracting travelers and town folk with their tinkling laughter and general shininess. But all in all they’re harmless. 

Not so with the snow sprites. 

Snow sprites are especially wily and conniving to boot. 

Given that nine months out of the year they exist in almost complete dormancy, it may come as no surprise that during the winter months (when they’re finally free), they get a bit…rowdy. 

And who is there for them to play with?

Why, the foxes of course!

Now, before you get concerned, you should know that the foxes aren’t entirely helpless. They’re lithe little things and extremely crafty. They can also smell anything within a twenty-meter radius. Even apprehension which, to them, has a faint burning aroma.

But even with all of that, the snow sprites still have two definite advantages: 

One, they are quite small—only about the length of a human pinky finger. 

And two, they can hide almost anywhere given that they can merge with other objects. 

This makes things much more difficult for the foxes who, upon taking the bait and starting up a chase, often find themselves colliding (head first) with various kinds of trees, rocks and other foliage. 

It’s frustrating and also tiresome to constantly be picked on. 

And to constantly lose.

However, one particular season (a winter when the sprites were feeling especially rambunctious), the foxes came into a rather large bit of luck. 

Settlers from the north—big, burly men with rugged beards and even ruggeder wives—were passing through the forest on their way to the southernmost plains. They were going to start anew.

With them they had buck-skin tents and bear-skin robes. They had sustenance in the form of salted meats and full-grain breads. 

They were a coarse people with very little fondness for nonessentials. 

Except for Mai. 

Mai, though easily as hardy as the rest of her clan, just barely made the cut as a bona fide sentimentalist. She brought with her one delicate, wooden figurine—in remembrance of her grandmother. 

The figurine was a painted perfect, milky white. Its eyes were pale green and the hair a deep auburn. It wore the traditional, beaded prayer garb of their people and matching moccasins. 

Mai held the thing dear and was always most careful with it during the clan’s travels. 

On the third night in their wooded encampment, Mai retrieved it from its protective cow-hide satchel and immediately set about alternating between cleaning and admiring. 

In the glow of the firelight, the figurine shone and glittered. The delicate features gave the subtle impression of humanly motion and Mai allowed herself the temporal peace of reminiscence.

She turned it over it her hands, watching contentedly as the small, pretty face seemed to smile and dance

and wink. 

Mai kept her composure. She allowed for no physical reaction that might alert one of her kinsmen to her distress. 

She did this not out of doubt for what she had seen but for the safety of her one beloved possession. 

Spirit lore was highly regarded as a science amongst her people. Mai was as familiar with the stories as she was with the process of tent-pitching or fishing in the winter.

She knew exactly what was taking place. 

In my hands, she thought, I hold a snow sprite.

Slowly, she looked about her for she knew that such a creature would take sanctuary in this thing, amongst all these people, only if it were in a considerable amount of danger.

Sure enough, circling the camp she saw the faint glimmer of many pairs of eyes.

Non-human eyes.

Fox eyes.  

Mai’s pulse quickened for she found that in her desperation she was unable to come up with a sound solution. 

How can I drive out this spirit without engendering the foxes to storm the camp?

How can I save this one thing that I love without putting the clan in danger?

She could not think of a way. It seemed she could either save the figurine or save her camp. But not both. 

Mai was distraught. 

She racked her brains.

She took a deep breath, collected herself and thought rationally. The solution, it turned out, was remarkably simple. 

Painful, but simple. 

Mai stood and signaled to her husband that she was going to relieve herself at the outskirts of the camp—where the wilderness just barely brushed their small slice of cultivated existence. 

He nodded his assent.

She stood and quietly tucked the figurine into the folds of her robe. She walked purposefully but unassumingly toward the trees. 

When she was out of sight, she crouched down and placed the figuring on the carpet of pine needles before her. She knew that the sprite would not relinquish its hiding place within the near future. The wolves were still about. 

So she left it there. Alone in the inky blackness of the forest’s mouth.

She did not cry though her heart tingled as though a hole had ripped opened within her and a breeze was now gently blowing through—tickling her in an unpleasant, nagging way.

She was lost in her loss until two points of vaguely greenish light grabbed her attention.

It was a fox. 

She looked at it for a long moment. She was not scared but knew that an understanding must be made between the two of them if they were to go their separate ways unharmed.

They stayed like that for moments that felt like hours until the fox made a sudden motion. 

It jerked its head in the direction of the figurine. She did not turn. 

There was a rustling in the distance behind her and then she heard the faint sound of gnawing and a small, tinkling whimper. 

She knew what was happening. 

She did not cry. 

The fox approached her cautiously.

It licked her moccasin. 

It followed her back to camp. 

It slept beside her. 

It walked next to her while she traveled. 

It stayed and made their togetherness a home.

crafty-things:

SIT Chair.

(via teachingliteracy)

havisham:

Gatsby, recoverd by Ian O’Phelan, Ryan Collier, Caree Michel & Bryce Wilmer.

(via teachingliteracy)

Ever the optomist

she looked forward to tomorrow/

next week/

years from now. 

She was excited—said she couldn’t wait to grow up. 

But while planning a future of spontaneity/ 

of adventure/

of stories she would tell her children/

she went ahead and did just that—grew up. 

And when her moment arose, 

she opened her mouth to tell her stories

and nothing came out. 

Just air and spit and realization. 

And she was so embarrassed that she felt instantly compelled to fill that hideously empty space with something sweet and fun.

So she told herself that sometime soon, 

she’d buy herself a cherry pepsi.

euniyah:

Rethink Scholarship at Langara 2010 Call for Entries

(via fuckyeahbookarts)

(via teachingliteracy)

(Source: thingsorganizedneatly)

When she was seven, Rebecca found a snake. 

She was sitting in the grass behind the playground with a girl named Jessie. She wasn’t all too fond of Jessie but it was someone to talk to and make daisy-crowns with so she didn’t complain. 

Truth be told, Jessie was her only friend.

Rebecca was surprisingly shy. 

Anyway, they were sitting in the grass tying stems together into tiny chains when she felt something pull around her ankle. She looked up to see the snake looking her dead in the eye, almost out of surprise at being caught. After a moment, Jessie noticed the thing too. 

Jessie had an awful fear of snakes so you can imagine the racket she made. She ran away before Rebecca could even lift a finger to make the universal sign for “shh!”

But Rebecca wasn’t scared. She liked snakes. They were misunderstood—people thought they were scary and slimy and cruel but they weren’t. 

They just did their own thing. 

She may have felt slightly differently if she had known what kind of snake it was but she didn’t so instead she greeted it with delight. And a bit of sass. She said

You’re a bad hugger! I’m going to set you free now but tomorrow you’re gonna come back and try again.

The snake did as it was told. Mostly because it had never been told anything in its life and was intrigued. 

The following afternoon, Rebecca sat in the grass. She was alone—Jessie now refused to venture outside the confines of the jungle-gym, and the snake took its chance. 

It moved in, pulled itself up over the girl’s midsection, wrapped around once and squeezed. 

Gently. 

Rebecca smiled. 

You came! That was much better. Now tell me your name. 

The snake’s name was Russell. 

And from then on they were a packaged-deal. 

Rebecca brought the creature with her everywhere. He coiled around her wrist and accompanied her to school, to the park, even to the dinner table. She loved him desperately for he was the friend she had always wanted and, in his own way, he loved her too.

They never wasted time making boring old daisy-crowns. They took real adventures.

One day they found an old cemetery a few blocks away from the park. They spent the rest of the afternoon laying flowers on as many of the headstones as they could. 

A while after that they found a small pond and made it into their own little hideaway: a spot that only they knew about. It became their super-secret, for-cool-people’s-eyes-only, home-base. 

And everything was good. 

But, as with so many things, their perfect world was going to have to come to an end. 

Rebecca was older now. It had been two years (almost three) since she and Russell had first met but it felt like a lifetime. They were inseparable. But there was a problem. 

Russell was not, as she suspected, a common garter snake. 

If he had been, there would have been nothing to worry about. Garter snakes don’t grow to be very big and they don’t require much in the way of taking care of. 

But Russell wasn’t a garter snake. 

Russell was something quite a bit more dangerous than that but he never told her. Probably because he didn’t know himself. He was raised in a family of garters. His neighbors were garters. Everyone he ever met was a garter. 

So why would he believe he could be anything but?

So neither of them knew. 

Until he started to grow. 

Rebecca had always fed him even though she wasn’t supposed to. Pets from the wild are supposed to get their own nourishment but she couldn’t help herself. 

She loved cookies and turkey sandwiches so she let her friend love them too. 

She fed him all the things she loved. 

And it showed. 

Russell grew bigger and bigger until he was almost twice her size when you stretched them out and measured. 

Rebecca didn’t think twice about any of this. She didn’t know a thing about garter snakes, except that they never bit. But Russell knew. He was bigger than his family, his neighbors, everyone he had ever known. 

He knew something was wrong but he kept it to himself. He was scared—didn’t want to risk their friendship. 

She was his best friend. 

But one day they argued. 

They argued and argued and fought and fought until finally he couldn’t stand it anymore. He loved her too much to fight like that so he wrapped around her (he could cover all the way from her knees to her torso now) and squeezed. 

He meant it to be gentle like he always was with her but in his panic, he drastically underestimated his own strength. 

Rebecca vomited. 

Russell was horrified. 

He slid off her and helped her fall safely to the floor. 

He wormed his way across her, lay on top of her and rested his head on her chest listening to her heart beat return to normal. He was relieved that she was okay. And embarrassed that he had hurt her. And angry that she had pushed him to that point where he could not even control his own body.

But he let go of everything except for the calm that had come now that the fighting had stopped. 

He loved her.

His weight was crushing her but she just smiled weakly. 

She forgave him.

She loved him. 

They never talked about that fight again. She was slightly more cautious but loved him just the same. He was determined to make things normal. 

But they soon fought again and this time, there was no resolution. 

They fought and fought, argued and argued and Rebecca struck him. And in response. Russell did the only thing his body knew how in the face of a threat. 

He bit down. Hard. 

Rebecca collapsed with a thud onto the floor—Russell was not there to break the fall this time. 

He watched her cringe and felt himself do the same. 

He had hurt her—hadn’t known he was poisonous and had infected her with his inner-ugliness.

He wrapped around her and squeezed again thinking if she vomited like last time, she’d be okay. 

But she didn’t. 

Nothing happened. 

He left her there. Too ashamed to keep trying and too heart-broken to watch and see if she would die. 

He left her there, with every good part of himself, and went back to pretending he was just a garter snake. 

A garter snake who had over-indulged on the love of a friend.