Category: non-fiction

ransom

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11-30-21

Tell me. What is your price? Do you ask money or words? Is it groveling, a debt of language and power, or compensation for the extra monetary burden my existence in the world and my stumbling about in it has placed on you?

I first thought it was a password you sought, always tried to find exactly the right words, kept searching when you lashed out. No entry.

But there are no right words. Only wrong ones. And trying to repay my imagined debt in apologies only deepens the divide between us. Makes me feel smaller and you feel farther away. But you tell me money isn’t the way out, could never be exchanged for a human life, is not the point, but continue to talk about it first with my heart in front of you, bleeding.

I’m done guessing, so tell me, what price do I need to pay to be free.

Snowflakes (Triptych)

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Snowflakes
There were snowflakes on the tip of her nose. They kept melting into cold wet drops and sliding off, so she tipped up her chin to catch more.

The whole time, Robbie was watching her. She could feel, and tried to ignore the silence he directed her way. He was worried about her, or scared, or angry, she could tell. But she didn’t care. She
didn’t want to care.

“Don’t you want to—?“
“No,” she cut him off.”
“To talk about it. I was going to ask if you wanted to talk about it.” She didn’t respond.
“Someone died,” he continued’ “You’re allowed to feel anything.” The silence he ended with stretched around her, frozen into snow.
“I know,” she said quietly. “I know. But I don’t want to.” She looked down and the snowflakes slid off her nose.


The Mortician
Everyone told the mortician she mustn’t feel anything. But the mortician didn’t think that was fair, nor did she think it was necessarily true.

The mortician looked down at her work. Laid quite ceremoniously on her table was an old woman with hair curled perfectly into her chin. She looked motherly, grandmotherly, maybe. She was the old woman who hadn’t wanted a memorial, or a funeral, or a viewing. She didn’t want to make a fuss.

She never liked to be a bother to her family. And they might not ever see her again.

The mortician fussed with the old woman’s hair. Perfect as it already was. Her finger brushed the woman’s cheek.

Robbie
Robbie wondered if he would cry. The inside of the auditorium was sweaty and drunk and filled with whiskey breath settling on cheap karaoke microphones.

The stale air was a sharp contrast with the outside where snow lined the gentle hill leading away from the door and snowmen waited to die. Robbie had
always cried when he wanted to least, when he was angry, when he felt rejected, when he imagined long-
time friends rolling their eyes over his back because he was too old to be crying like this. And he pressed his head in his hands to keep the tears from sliding down his cheeks because he was too old to be crying like this.

And he never cried when he wanted to, never cried when it was okay to. When everyone would understand, his chest was as still and cold as a rock.

The fermenting air of the auditorium climbing around him, Robbie decided that he could no longer breathe. He decided he wanted to see the snowmen one more time, before they finally died.
She was still in the snow with nothing more than a sweatshirt.

“I want to talk about it,” Robbie croaked when he found her again. “We won’t even get to see her again.”
“Just watch the snow,” she whispered. “Try to catch it on your nose.”

duncan hall 1

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11-26-21

Duncan Hall was someone who only orbited my life briefly, but still found a way to make his incision.

He continually would drift away then find some new, benign-seeming way to insert himself back into my life, a response to one of my querries on the email-forums of my small college. Then asking about me, my break. Querries unrealted to him. That he had no business replying to. In a 1-2 rythm, once before each break he returned, bridging my singular brush with him as more than just a passer-by. Maybe it’s self-centered to perceive it that way, but that’s how well all percieve life: with ourselves at the center of it all. Ourselves our central node of action and reaction, the only real point of feedback we have.

I was left percieving him through second-hand messages. Left constructing what his actions might mean from the smaller sum of his words.

Becasue he had a way of saying things without really saying anything at all. We could talk for hours about the number of selves contained in the mind, the meaning contained in the space between the end of one breath and the start of the next, and all the while, he could never allow himself to be contained by another person with any more committment than the start and end of a conversation.

As I left his suite lounge that night, I knew he had left too many signals unanswered, that my hope of him as more-than-a-friend or even as more than a mere spectre on the lanscape on my life would also, likely, be unanswered. But I allowed myself to be bouyed along by hope that had already seeded, nurtured by other words and actions, before the pulling-back, before I got close enough to see the fissures beneath the surface, the ones of the sort we all keep behind our smiles for strangers.

I, also, had the chance to percieve him through second-hand stories.

A friend of a friend was his girlfriend, on-and-off, bridging, reaching to either side of whatever was – or wasn’t – with me.

One night, a singular day before Valentine’s day, a symbolic holiday with no appartent purpose but to catalyze romantic reactions – towards their beginnings or ends, Duncan Hall stopped me in the stairwell to address my open-book eyes, my open-book attitude, my open-book crush on him. He told me that everything was breaking apart and that he had no idea when it would come back together. I think, now, I could diagnois his particular disease as the age of 23. In the moment, though, I thanked him for his honesty.

Three weeks later he was with her again.

She, too, loved his philisophical bent. Who knew, what an aphrodasiac topics of existentialism or the nature of self could be. Maybe if the secret got out, more guys would be philosophy majors.

But hearing her story makes me wonder what it actually means to be with someone. Where do we draw this imaginary line? With a kiss? With sex? When we have seen certain amounts of each others’ naked flesh?

Yes, she was with him physically but his resistence to closeness of other kinds, of being contianed by another person, remained.

They got high together one night. That’s when he told her. Told her he couldn’t be contained anymore. He probably had good reasons, good excuses, good coverups from the rational mind. But then again, we always do when we’re running away from fear.

She texted her friend, my friend one line.

This was a mistake.

jesse 2

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12/19/2022

We sow seeds. Some of them grow, some don’t. Some bloom into flowers, beautiful but impermanent. And some sprout into sturdy, solid trees, meant to last for decades.

I want to have lazy Sunday plans, roll out of bed with someone and then decide what to do together. Only worried about about what time the movie is or how long the brunch line.

I want to cry in a movie with someone I love.

women talking 2

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We think of ourselves, our goals, as climbing mountains. The fallacy of this is there are always taller mountains to climb, we must always keep moving. Our progress, then, is more like the ocean, or any body of water, in its constant movement slowly but surely eroding the rock benath it, creating new shapes and softening old.

(I am allowed to talk in a pretensious way, a ‘male’ way/breifly i wonder, what will I amount to?/the anxiety overtakes me for a second)

women talking

Sophi NielsenLeave a comment

01/25/2023

what makes something cinematic…

and here i begin to doubt my own words

they falter because i stop believing in them as i create them

what make something cinematic is the artful manipulation of coincidence. the kind that rarely happens in real life and when it does, it feels magical. you feel as though you’ve seen something you should not have. a peak behind some universal curtain

“what follows is an act of female imagination” – Women Talking

we wrest the narrative from our attackers hands