Flashing

Recount 1: Friday Afternoon

It was a Friday afternoon.

  I recall the scratching noise, and the sound of quiet, amplifying any little sniffle. I flicked on the light above my desk. It flickered, trying to decide if I was worthy. I waited for the light to get brighter, but it remained in its state of dull illumination and rapid flicker. The lined paper I'd ripped from my composition notebook was wearing down from my assaulting it with the eraser. I sighed, sitting back in the old, wooden seat and glancing at the graffiti of past desk-users. "The truth is out there," the back wall of the enclosed desk read. I preferred this statement over the more vulgar things written. For the intent of story-telling, I'll embellish my appearance, describing more from how I felt.

  I'm a young adult, the exact age does not matter. My legs are thin, as is the rest of me. My hair is a straggly mess of frizz that descends to my shoulders. It's dyed a glowing silver. My fingernails are cut as short as is comfortable and lacquered with black polish. Since I walk the line between worlds, I wear my trench coat everyday: my mind is a chilly place. My coat is black, not as long as I'd like, and has gleaming blackish buttons on the sleeves and up the front. Today, I wore a short, plaid skirt and a faded orange tee-shirt that I've kidnapped from my boyfriend. The tights I wore were once my mother's, a thin black nylon with subtle sparkles within the material. The shoes I've worn for the past month are my high-top black Chuck-Taylor's.

  I saw someone moving down the row of desks. He was a guy, tall and wearing a maroon colored shirt. His skin was a light olive color; his hair was dark brown. I only saw him out of the corner of my eye. I'm trying to practice observing. I felt a pang of insecurity as he walked swiftly by. On my laptop screen, I had open a picture of an anime character that I was trying to draw. At this point though, my paper's health was rapidly declining, and I was getting nowhere good with the drawing. "It'll have to wait until tonight," I thought, "when I have better materials and a better environment." Again, the guy walked by; he'd probably just gone to the bathroom or something. Perhaps he's as afraid of me as I am of him. I chuckled to myself: "I'm not afraid of him." In a few moments, my stomach's growling inclined me to pack up my things. The room was still, still quiet. This setting was perfect for getting lost in thought.

   On my way towards the stairwell, I noticed a young man waiting for the elevator to show up. He smiled at me, and I wondered if he thought I was cute. My feet scurried me down the stairs to the third floor, where like a subway station, I'd be heading to the stairwell that would lead me to my destination. Meandering through the numerous bookshelves as a detour, I flashed, recalling all the other library's I'd been to. The setting around me turned grayscale, and the scattered others who meandered through the 3rd floor stocks became invisible to me. I pulled my coat tighter around my torso and smirked. What had caught my eye was a series of books to my right. I turned to face the shelf. I heard someone walking around me, but not someone who was real. This person, whoever they may have been, was only a part of the flash. I saw the library from my hometown, with its white shelves upon shelves upon shelves. I reveled in the memory of myself, wearing an outrageous sun-hat complete with fake feathers, flicking my index finger over the books of poetry. Here, I saw similar books. The colors around slowly crept back into my view as I paced the aisle I'd stopped in. I'd stopped for names such as "William Faulkner," "E.e.  Cummings," and "Robert Frost." While quite a few of the books with those names and similar names were disappointingly some scholarly biography of said poet/20th century author, I was able to uncover a couple--

  Something on the opposite side of the shelf had caught my eye. It had been a flicker, like the light upstairs. A flicker of what, I wondered. My initial theory was that the flicker had been a fellow meanderer's movement, and for the time, I was satisfied with that theory. I continued browsing.

  This time I recalled the library at my high school, and the various classics we'd read in English class. My eyes searched for a copy of The Great Gatsby amongst the scholarly biographies. There was indeed one copy. The color had come back completely, and it was far too warm between the shelves. At the end of the aisle, on the middle-top shelf, I saw the name "Jonathan Swift." I don't know what inclined me to continue my glancing at this section; I'd certainly heard of Swift, but I didn't know any of his works off the top of my head. The world froze though, when I noticed a red-covered book with the title "Gulliver's Travels." When I reached up to pull out the book, there was another flash of that undefined person wandering around my mind. I will now offer an explanation.

  As I slightly mentioned earlier, I enjoy anime. I enjoy anime to an extent and in a way that it influences my behavior to a degree. I've always idolized people easily. The anime I most recently watched had a character (actually the one I was trying to draw) who was fond of literature. Among his other characteristics were intelligence, cynicism and charisma. By the end of the anime, I had grown to admire this character. To me, he symbolized the way I felt I was and the way I wanted to be. At multiple points in the anime, he'd quoted Gulliver's Travels.

  I've realized while writing this, that unless there was an actual person who traipsed by the other side of the shelf, I believe the "flicker" I noticed was my own imagination, imagining the character I so admired approving of my actions. So, when my hand clutched the novel, I felt a sense of empowerment, and in my mind of black and white and chill, I saw the character grinning back at me from the other side of the shelf. A part of my imagination, he represented a figment of myself. I felt an arrogance, a beauty, a self-awareness and enjoyment of self as I sat in one of the armchairs between sets of shelves. I flicked through the pages of Gulliver's Travels,  content as I took in the literature I'd hoped would enlighten me and expand my viewpoint of the world.