with your pen and notebook, you've blown me away

i feel like a novice at everything…

awake

i do not feel like looking for pictures for this, so i’ll draw it for you with words.

my dress is sea green. old, faded. it was softer when it was new, but i didn’t know it then. i used to be afraid to show my knees. not consciously afraid, but wary. without knowing, i would decide against it. but it is summer now. and even before it was, i discovered them, like they had never really been there to me before… someone living right across the hall for twenty years and all of the sudden, one day, they choose to introduce themselves. no more awkward, casual head knods or exchanges of misdelivered mail. i like having them around. they’re very… supportive. (i laugh at myself… it’s a very good thing to be able to do...)

it is like exploring the mind of a child, but this child has all of my experiences. this child is intentionally retrogressing, but she doesn’t appear stupid, not even foolish. just… pure, natural, creative, enthusiastic, unhindered, a picture of invinsibility; yet she handles everything with care, with a retrospective gentility. a grown-up would say, “oh it’s so refreshing!” and the little girl would look at her without a word, for only as long as she had to. she is all of these things, but she is still vulnerable. she knows that she’s looking back, that there is nothing she can do to change what has happened, that only she can see that world as she sees it, that she can’t stay. melancholy can live here. nastalgia, grief, regret. it looks like a polaroid picture, a whole slew of them in quick animation. all of these things…. she visits them because they are a part of her, or maybe she is a part of them. (do you visit your mother? do you tease your brother?) what can live here isn’t necessarily what does. not all the time….

off-white sheets and summer nights. the curves of my feet and how they feel in the grass. toes first, gracefully.

i won’t deny that people have to grow up. but really, it’s like tissue paper rolling away in the breeze of a fan. it’s real enough as it is, but there are so many things to do with it. it is not to be wasted, and it is not to be viewed as though we’re looking through one end of a toilet paper tube at the tile on the side of the bathtub. (if you do happen to be looking through one end of a toilet paper tube at the tile on the side of the bathtub, you ought to see more than what’s there. it’s a frozen tundra. it’s an ivory palace. it’s the moon. it’s the uncovered skin of the one you love. whatever it is, it is not what it seems….)

the small space left between my ring and my finger, and the movement of my hands to hold on, to comfort.

this isn’t something that you might glimpse through a window. a window, though the glass is clear, still separates you from what you see. no this, this is like watching children open Christmas presents, or the world of Le Petit Prince, or a dream made up of little paper cut-outs. there is a certain truth to them. there is a certain truth.

everything she thinks, she also creates. for sanity, for life, for simplicity’s sake… you can imagine any reason and pin it to her brow. she will wear it gladly, for she cannot change what you see. she would not.

she hopes, and they are concrete things… living pictures, thriving places. but all of it is very quiet. all of these conversations, all of these inspirations and whims, these sparks, these steps… they are hers, behind her eyes. so far she is alone in relishing this experience. someone else must know… and so she is looking, chasing fireflies, lanterns that cannot burn.

by jeff hanson