11/21/2017 2 Comments A Child on a Tuesday MorningThere are times when an undeniable light, persists amid undeniable darkness. There are times when joy seeps through the cracks of a fractured underside, a broken tomorrow. Our cameraman is wandering aimlessly through a house of barren walls and muted colours. Soft music illuminates the screen, and the sounds of cooking drift in and out of the kitchen. But our cameraman focuses not on these things; his wandering is more focused and direct. He is not wandering, he is searching. Our cameraman stops finally at a glass door, and allows his camera to rest on a point. The door is a little dirty, with smudges at about dog nose and child finger height. A screen door creates a thin black web that wraps across the entire frame, possibly into forever. Through this web we can make out a gray deck, on a gray day, with a gray table to the left and a small child to the right. The child is yellow, head to toe she glows with an exceptional brightness. It ricochets off of the grey surroundings; it lingers with a salty pink hue. The child is dancing, a dance that seems more like floating, like kissing the air instead of the ground. She is dancing with a tall peach coloured rabbit, the rabbit is almost as tall as she is, and almost as real. The two carve away the day with each flick and flit of their soft small limbs. The child is in control, and yet she seems free—free to go anywhere and see anything, free to move in any direction that her heart yearns for. In her eyes there is a wholeness, an alertness. She is she, without question or confusion, she is what she is now and what she will be tomorrow and for the rest of her years, none of this makes her nervous. A smaller brown child waddles into her melodious scene, with heavy measured steps that plop and pound into the gray deck’s planks. She is shrieking, she is shrieking something at the dancing girl. She is forming words; she is trying to say her name. The girl takes no notice of this small thing moving through her space. She is too entranced in the wonders of her limbs and how the sky spins when she does. The young child is ignored and eventually gives up. The girl and her rabbit go on dancing--the rabbit tosses and flies through the air--the girl hums and closes her eyes. Our cameraman takes a step back. This…. must truly be paradise, he thinks. Paradise is not a place, not a thing… but a moment, a feeling, a light that shines through grayness, even on the grayest of days.
Years later, a woman sits alone at her desk. The time is late in the evening, she is tired and uninspired, exploring the depths of her laptop’s files. She comes across a video, one taken a long while back, when camera quality was not good, and nobody cared if it was. In the video a girl is dancing to soft music, with a peach coloured rabbit in her arms, carving out the sky and putting it in her pocket. She recognizes the short blonde hair, rounded nose, and puffy cheeks as her own. She recognizes the rabbit as well, as one she held dear in her younger years. This cannot be me, she thinks, I was never that happy, I was never that free.
2 Comments
10/16/2019 05:53:09 pm
I used to write a lot of stuff in my diary, but I just stopped. I do not even remember why I stopped doing it, but I just know that I stopped. I feel like having friends was part of it, but I just do not know why. I think that it is great that I had a diary growing up. I was able to put my problems into words and I learned the truth about what I was feeling.
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11/3/2022 11:12:59 am
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