January 14 2014

Writing Style Attempt: Second Person

 

You have only been here once before, but the familiarity between your lungs and the moist air, the effortless way your feet navigate the uneven floor knocks that fact out of the equation. Similarly, the desire you feel for the paper thin bark that surrounds you, radiates guiltlessly from your palms sends a signal to your whole body that this is and always has been, home.  

***

When you were twelve you saw a movie that took place in a not so far away city. You loved this movie. You were enchanted by its characters and the way it made you spit out that giggle your mother light-heartedly made fun of you for. You watched it on VHS more often that you’d now like to admit and each viewing only intensified the wide range of emotions it elicited in you.

 

Upon one of these many viewings – which one, you cannot possibly recall – you sat up from the living room couch, you pushed up your torso from the pillow on the floor, you removed our cheek from the cradle of your hands, you stopped making the instant iced tea or scooping the ice cream from the bottom of the bowl and froze.

 

This place is real. You thought. This place is living and breathing and growing and shrinking right this moment. This place has stray cats and houses not similar to mine. This place is a place and not a figment in my head or a setting in a movie. This place is real and I could live in it and make it mine.

 

As a young kid and into your teens you had many moments like this, where your body stopped moving and your mind took over. Sometimes it took seconds. Other times it took an hour. This was how you figured things out. This is how you became a child that was perceived as troubled. This was why the girls in 8^th grade called you a snob and you cried, “Why?” This action of non-action and need to be nothing but a mind discovering its purpose kept you occupied and developed you from a brainwashed child to an imaginative and curious thinker.

This particular instance that you are remembering now, when you realized that there was in fact life available to you outside the contents of a VHS player, expanded a very particular and very helpful part of your brain. It bloomed the desire to leave. To explore. To be on your own and figure out if the places you felt most comfortable in no, your bed, your church, the pillow in front of the TV, your mother’s arms, were in fact your true home. Or if your home existed in a place you had never even considered to be real.

After this, you began to notice other actual places that you had previously over looked. Even the ones that took place in the very distant past, those too, were in fact real places that millions of people have lived and have very personal ties to. Even though you couldn't do the math, you estimated that by the time you were 50 and ready to retire, you would have had enough time to have visited every place you’d read about and remembered in the last 12 years of your life and by then, you could decide. Then you would truly know what home was and what home wasn’t yours.

***

Six months in, the paper thin bark on your favorite tree was wrinkling and began to spoil. The knots grew thicker and grey in color. The delicate branches snapped with the slightest wind and you watched the once luminous flora become a sickly figure against the now pasty sky. You tripped every time you walked the uneven earth and developed a wheeze from gasping for breath while squinting to see the limp stars in an over-lit sky. Tonight, you stand, frozen.

            This place is real. You think. But I am not of it. This place moves forward, moves back, keeps getting bigger as I get smaller and smaller. I called this my home but it has become a chore. I have to be bigger than my surroundings and rely on me to keep it so. This place that once was, now is no longer mine.

You take a difficult breath in and recall the first kiss you had with this once beautiful place - which reminds you – there are still 20 years till you are 50 and more than an equal amount of places you still haven’t been. Much greater land to adapt to or conquer. Unseen places that have been tightly contained in your movies, your imagination and your books. You hold out your hand to the streaky, starless sky and say, “Now where to?’’

- ClassyB