|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Posted: Sat Sep 12, 2009 6:33 pm
visitors
If I tell you my life story, you've got to be prepared to listen.
I mean, it's not really that interesting, some bits, so I'll try to keep that stuff kind of brief, but if you sit down here, right here, on the edge of my bed and tell me to talk, well, I'm going to. I don't want to waste my breath, since I'm not sure how much breath I have left, and anyway, this story is me. It's all I've got for sure, so when you say that I have to share it, you'd better pay attention, because it's important. Well, in my opinion anyway, I mean a few hundred years from now it probably won't be. I've seen the museum attached to this house, we have hundred-year-old hairpins in cases but we don't know who they belonged to. Funny how that stuff works, but things last longer than people, and even peoples' stories, so this is a really limited engagement kind of thing. It might not matter hundreds of years from now, when they have my shoes in glass boxes for tourists to look at, but right now it does.
I don't know how long I have to live. No one does, not even the doctors in their long white coats and their cold metal stethoscopes. But if you remember me, it'll be almost like I'll live as long as you do, right? So it's like I said. You've got to be ready to listen.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2009 8:00 pm
birth of laughter
Once upon a time, there was a boy made of earth and laughter. He rose from the crudest who-knows-what to consciousness, and the first thing that greeted his ears was the sweetest music in the world. A pleasant sound that filled him up with a satisfying warmth and seemed to make the very sun shine brighter, that contented chuckle lingered and mingled with the smell of earth and dew and grass, and then cut off abruptly. There was a gentle rustling and the boy felt himself being placed gently in a bush.
And then he was alone, hidden, and unable or unwilling to do anything but lay on his side and stare at the dappled sunlight between the leaves. Half of him was expecting the laughter to return for him, even as the hours slipped away. His limbs were heavy to lift, too heavy, and he heard many footsteps pass before he finally pushed himself up to look beyond the leafy shelter he had been placed in. Motivated by hunger and thirst, held back by that odd heaviness in his body, he climbed from under the roots of his world and into a brighter reality, full of faces attached to the feet he had watched for so long, full of life, light, and a blue, blue sky stretching all the way to infinity. He blinked, adjusting, and slowly broke into a delighted chuckle.
It was the death of laughter, it was the birth of laughter, it was the beginning of my scattered days of drifting.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2009 9:42 am
apologies
So that was my birth, and I'm sorry to talk about it in such a roundabout way. It's a little bit easier, you know, and I do it sometimes, talking about the difficult bits in the third person. It drives Father insane, but that kind of thing just sounds odd to me, even though I was there, and I remember it as if it were yesterday. (In fact it was a few years ago. For a flower, I grow like a weed.) If it bothers you, best to leave now, I'm probably going to do it again and all, and I've tried not to but, I really can't help it. I don't know why the beginning is the hardest part for me to tell people about, it really should be one of the easiest. But I don't think I can forget the sound, and I think that's what bothers me the most. The sound of that woman and the subsequent silence are a little hard for me to relive. I'd rather make the boy of earth and laughter relive it for me.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Jul 31, 2010 2:08 pm
archer
As my father tells it, I was a wild boy when he found me.
My father was never a wild boy, always stern, always serious, shuffling through life with his nose in a book and a frown on his face. He was born old, and the only thing left to do was wait for his body to catch up to him. Thus, to make the wait more tolerable, he became the curate of a small museum, and surrounded himself with things even older than he felt to pass the time. He kept his museum in perfect order, everything just so. In a way, the museum and adjoining house were his own little universe, a place that was pristine and wholly his, a place where hardly anything could disturb him.
Then he found me.
I was outside the museum at the time, no longer a boy of earth and laughter, but a thin, ragged thing whose limbs had become so heavy as to be nearly impossible to lift. The grey mold that had corrupted the rose I was born from was spreading rapidly down my arm, and it was getting harder to smile. My father, after questioning me about my parents, made me stay for the night and called a doctor to tend to me. I was too weak to fight, but according to my father, I wailed all night long, attempted to bite the doctor, and made various screeching threats to his family. Unsure of how to deal with a boy who was part plant, and somewhat shaken by the force of my resistance, the doctor called a botanist, and they spent the better part of the night deep in hushed conversation.
That morning, they grimly told my father their conclusion. When a white rose contracts grey mold, the part that is infected must be pruned off, and they didn't feel like doing anything else would be medically responsible.
This is the part that I don't need my father's help to remember, the part that is crystal clear in my mind.
It starts with a knock on the door, my father says "Boy," and I look up from my place on the bed.
"Lemme out, mister," I plead, "I ain't done anything."
My father steps into the room and sits next to me, pressing his hand against my forehead when I try again to bite him. "I'm afraid it's not as simple as that," he says reluctantly, and I snort.
"Just open the door, mister. It ain't complicated."
"Move your arm, then," My father asks of me. I look at him suspiciously for a moment and he pushes my forehead a little farther, pushing me over. It takes minutes, agonizing minutes for me to pull myself back into a sitting position. "How do you intend to climb out?"
I shrug. "Slowly. It don't matter to you how I get out."
My father kneels down in front of me and looks into my eyes. His hand is still on my forehead, I can't fight him. "Boy, you know that arm isn't right, don't you?" he asks carefully. I shrug again, looking away. "It wasn't always like that, was it? Those doctors in there think it's been spreading across your body. You're lucky I found you this early, but I guarantee you that if you go outside through my window and don't do anything about that arm, you'll be completely immobile in a month. Less, maybe. Do you understand?"
I'm still not looking at him, and he moves so that he's facing me again. "I said, do you understand?"
I let out a noncommittal grunt.
"They say that if we cut off your arm, you'll live, but it'll be difficult. They don't think you should be outside, or in the wet. If you want to get better and stay better, you have to stay somewhere safe."
Another grunt. There's a tight feeling in my chest as I feel a strange prickling behind my eyes. "You didn't answer me the first time I asked, so answer me now. Do you have parents?" My father frowns at me like I'm a patient on my deathbed, and it makes me uncomfortable. My eyes have begun to water. I remember what he said about getting wet and try to stop it.
"D-don't have any." I mutter weepily.
My father stands up, runs a hand through his hair, and sighs. He doesn't know how to handle things that don't require regular dusting and cataloguing, this much is clear to me even then. He has never had to tell a statue that it only has a month left to live. Perhaps the offer he makes next is genuine, perhaps it's simply to try to get me to stop crying on his wood flooring, but either way he says, "You may stay with me, if you don't have anywhere else to go. Do you want to get better?"
Hiccuping, I examine him carefully, and then look at my withered arm. It's heavy and it hurts, and for a terrifying moment, I imagine my whole body being like that. I bob my head up and down: Yes, yes, yes.
He sits down on the bed again, taking his hand off my forehead. "Very well," he tells me, "If that is what you want, we can do that."
That wasn't when I started to think of Archer Wells as my father, but from what he tells me, that was the moment I became his son.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2010 4:37 pm
an education
The days after that decision were an endless education. Everything I knew how to do had to be re-learned or forgotten, and on top of trying to figure out how to do everything my right hand had done with my left hand, Father had taken it upon himself to teach me to be a born-old gentleman like he was. I couldn't push, couldn't bite, had to defend myself with words over force, and nothing was easy. Gentlemen had a certain way to speaking, of eating, even of entering and exiting rooms, and trying to remember it all overwhelmed me. My days were a flood of manners, of Milton, of stepping this way, thinking that way, saying this thing, doing that thing, and above all, obeying the Primary Rules. My illness had brought handicaps besides the arm, I suffered from both a poor constitution and the constant threat of the Grey Mold somehow returning, from some dormant spore stuck under my skin. Whereas all the other lessons Father shoved precariously into my head were supplementary, the Primary Rules, meant to preserve my health, were the pillars of my education, repeated over and over again until I could recite them blindfolded backwards without any hesitation. Never go outside, never touch the unclean, Always keep as dry as possible, don't overwhelm yourself. I knew so many rules that I could barely follow them all, but these four trumped all others, necessary to my survival rather than just important to my outward appearance and actions.
With the rules ground into my mind, I began to withdraw, losing my fight, losing my grasp on the world outside the museum. Eventually my depression ended, but I drifted into disinterestedness. People outside of my bubble took too much effort to reach, so I enforced my own isolation more strictly than my father ever could by cutting my ties to them personally. As far as the visitors to my father's museum were concerned, I was nonexistent, and vice versa, and I continued down this damaging path until I got a wake up call.
This came in the form of a literal phone call on one of the doctor days, where the man who first decided to amputate my arm was supposed to check on me with his botanist friend and make sure I was in good health or at least, as the man used to joke, not dead yet. It was no secret to anyone in the house that good health was far beyond my immune system's abilities, and that 'healthy' for me meant not coughing up blood. I hated the doctor days, and these days were the only times I had any resistance left in me. I railed against those doctors like they were axe murderers, and getting me to sit down for my check up each month was something everyone involved dreaded.
That day, I was hiding in my father's study. He and the doctors were performing the routine of searching the house for my newest hiding place, almost a mechanical exercise by then. I was falling asleep under his desk, the smell of that particular soap he used was filling the room and giving me an awful sort of headache, and the strain of hiding always wore me out. As I nodded off though, the phone on the desk began to ring. I quickly picked it up so my father wouldn't come into the study, whispering "This is the Wells residence, Christopher speaking. May I help you?" Even on my most rebellious days, my father's lessons came to me faster than my mind could react to them. By now they were most of my life.
There was a voice on the other end, a high pitched, pretty voice that introduced itself. I heard the doctors in the distance, and as I burst out of the study and ran down the hallway, I held onto the phone, her name ringing in my head.
She was the first outside voice I had heard in a long time, and she had woken me up to the outside world I had been hiding myself from. I didn't know it when I picked up the telephone, but she was to be my best friend, my constant ally, and the object of my admiration for the rest of my life.
Lukia.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2010 6:18 pm
the other side
After I met Lukia I underwent my second metamorphosis. My best friends were no longer Wordsworth and Coleridge, but a real, living person, somewhere on the other side of that phone line, someone I could hear breathing into the phone if I let it fall silent. But as many calls as I made, Lukia was still distant, on the other side of the walls that separated me from the outside. She was so much closer than the sleeping Romantics, dead and gone and pressed into the pages of their poetry, but the distance between us still seemed uncrossable. She was alive, yes, but still hard to imagine as real, even if I let myself hear her breathing till the end of time. To help preserve her like the poets I admired, lest she prove to be just a specter in my overwrought imagination, I stockpiled journals and began recording things about our conversations that made me laugh, or tried to draw what I thought she might look like. On the page, she seemed so much more tangible, and as I captured her, I invariably ended up getting distracted and capturing anything else that caught my attention. The books filled fast, with quotes I liked, pictures of things I wanted to remember or had never really seen, but merely imagined, and my thoughts on everything I could think to wonder about. Lukia had opened me up to the world I couldn't walk in, and suddenly it wasn't the other world, it was Lukia's world. just like I wanted her to be closer to me, I wanted her world, to feel the air she felt, to hear the sounds she heard, to see the things that she could never see, so I could tell her something she didn't know about the world she knew so much more about than I did. Coleridge and Wordsworth had always described nature like they lived in Eden, but nothing was so compelling to me as imagining the world with Lukia in it. Mount Snowdon could no longer move me as much as my one responsive companion could. Father treated me like a gentleman, the doctors treated me like a headache, and Wordsworth and Coleridge refused to treat me at all. Lukia treated me like a human, and that turned out to be all I had needed to open myself up to the world, or at least to my journals, which I tried to fill with every bit of myself and what I loved that I could think of so that one day my walls would be lined with these sentiments of me, and I could throw them out into Lukia's world, parts of my mind visiting places that I could not, living for me by proxy like the Romantics lived by proxy through the classic literature they had put to pen.
Was I mad? The fervour that gripped me and to some extent grips me still was peculiar for a boy my age, but it was the first time I felt I had been given a chance to properly live since my birth. The carefully crafted world that I had been raised in was no longer the only thing I was able to properly acknowledge, and I felt ecstatic to finally recognize everything outside the walls, ecstatic and anxious that I should never be able to see it all properly. One of these days, I swore to myself that I would go out there, not just my journals, but my whole self, I would see Lukia's world, and finally know what else I had been missing besides the sound of her voice. I feared that day would be the death of me, the doctors certainly seemed to think so, and whenever I brought it up to them, they admonished me to no small degree about my fate were I to leave. The infection, your immune system, the dangers! They exclaimed their worries like concerned mother hens, but my mind was already made up, and had been since I had met Lukia. Even if it was the death of me, my journals would not be enough forever. And one day, I would leave them, see the other side of the walls for myself, whether I could handle it or not.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reply
