Flashing

Recount 3: The Sun Sets

I left at sunset.

  As I had been leaving, one of my roommates emerged from the other side of the apartment. A porky young adult, he carried a large bag of "Veggie Stix." He stood in front of the four open windows lining the far wall of the living room.

 "Do you think the sky looks strange too?" I inquired of him as I was lacing my sneakers.

 "Yeah" he answered. The lights not yet turned on in the apartment, shadows danced across the tile below my shoes. My coat sprawled slightly onto the floor as I was bent down in the shoe-tying process. I hadn't washed my hair that morning and was consequently hyper-aware of its texture as it brushed my cheeks. My roommate asked if I'd seen his ice packs and pawed through the freezer in search of them. I relayed that I hadn't seen them, that he should ask our other roommate as he often uses the freezer to store meat. Then I stood up, getting ready to open a freezer of my own. I left with a muttered "see ya." Once I'd broken the barrier into the outside world, hearing the door shut behind me, I inhaled deeply the dry, icy air surrounding my body. This presumably caused the cool oxygen to fill my lungs and stretch its way about my veins.

  Donning my trench coat once again, a maniacal smile lit my face from time to time, like when I narrated visions of the abyss to myself. The outside world today had the immediate chill of an open freezer bleeding into the world around. My hands longed for the embrace of my pockets, but I would not let them have such comfort. "Feel the cold stretching across your fingers," I told myself. This was true Autumn air, its touch almost sharp with chill. I thought of how lovely such an air was, and as I breathed deeply once again, the world toned itself down. I saw myself sprinting freely to the tree across the front lawn of the house I'd lived in for part of my youth. Then, the black and white scene left, and as if I'd opened my eyes, I became more in tune with the strange sky overhead. Down a slight hill that made a piece of my path, there was a girl and a guy setting up a camera.

"It's like someone put a filter over it..." my roommate had said with regards to the sky. I'd agreed with a slight sound of affirmation. The two with the camera I spared only one look at. The sky seemed to be tinted yellow. My theory as to why this was is that while the bright orange sun was cascading down the horizon, a thick cloud covering of tar color was roving about half of the sky.

"Go away," I spoke instinctively to my imagination, when a figment of myself seemed to be walking beside me. I then pleaded with myself to ignore those words. The yellowed sky could be a sign of decay, could be a photo-filter, like my roommate had described, or it could be the internal state of myself. As the light is setting low, a phenomena is occurring which causes a tint of the world around. The light is my drive and association to society, while that light dwindles, a cloud cover swirls about, an abyss of mind. This combination, a rare circumstance, causes strange looking things. I am the sepia toned setting sun.

  I found myself in the library once again. Sitting in my usual spot amongst the classic literature, I read the final chapters of Gulliver's Travels. The books seemed to applaud me at returning once again to their domain. I began to think of them as entities which had passed, as they were. I felt such melancholic joy when surrounded by a mass of books because I know that someone left those words and their meaning; I am a chink in the chain. As most of them are dead now, I will also soon be described by that term. Sitting in the average armchair of which there were three placed in this area between the medium wood shelves, the color of which was slightly lighter than the end table back home, I had a fiendish hope that I would one day join the books. Yes, I so desired to end up on a shelf on the third floor of a mostly-academic library at a technology school. It was warm there. I read with my legs crossed and my coat slathering the back of the chair. My black coffee was gone, and the empty cup rested beside my seat. A person here-and-there passed by my sanctuary, but I paid them no attention more than a glance up from my reading. There was one notable young man wearing a full suit with a blue tie. He passed me multiple times, and when I got up to search for my next fix, I passed him in one of the aisles.

  The book I'd intended to leave with was Orwell's A Clergyman's Daughter; however, upon being in the situation to retrieve a new source of enlightenment, as I'm still calling it, my thoughts brought me to another selection. Since I'm so adopting the concept of the looking into the abyss, and yes, having it look back into me, I found it in good measure to check-out Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. After some online investigating, I uncovered that book's approximate location. "B3313 .JKE E5 1989, 4th FLOOR," the internet told me. So, I traipsed up the stairs to the highest level of the library and began reading the shelf labels. It took a bit of wandering around to realize that "B", just "B" and not "BS" or "BX", was on the opposite side of the floor. When I finally found "B", I also found a female librarian putting away some of the stock. She made me nervous, her hair pulled onto her head. She was wearing a gray sweatshirt, and worst of all, she looked at me as I'd approached the aisle. "Yes," I thought, "I'm looking at philosophy books. No, I'm not lost." When I finally found my target, I was so happy to pull it off the shelf. I grinned with personal satisfaction at the simply-blue cover. With that book in hand, I shuffled back downstairs and picked up the Orwell book on my way out of the library.

  It was dark then, past 8pm. The orange lights lining the walkways had switched on. I beheld the beautiful sky above me, watching the leaves sway as I yet again inhaled passionately. "Take me with you," I thought, offering myself to the world. But, I knew, once I returned home, I'd need to play with the fire of reality once again. By this, I mean I'd need to work on my homework.

  And this I started to do once I'd gone inside and settled back into the room my boyfriend and I share. But, eventually, after trying to put my best foot forward on the assignment, I found myself quite distraught at my inability to solve the problem. As I was Googling certain programming syntaxes and functions, I sobbed softly, my breath erratic. I was not doing this on purpose, as I have before done for lack of any other way to express myself. The gray IDE screen seemed to mock my existence, whispering that I was already being swallowed by the abyss, that I cannot have the best of both worlds. I came to the panicked idea that a programmer cannot write with grace and conversely, that a skilled writer cannot solve the algorithmic problems inherent in programming. The thought of this as well as the reoccurring thought of the abyss's black nature left me in such a fearful state that I was hyperventilating.

  I feel I can still hear the whispers of myself around me. When I was younger, I created imaginations to comfort me. And, as I've gotten older, these figments I recognize to be aspects of myself. When the world seems to be closing in around like a shrinking closet or a rapidly descending elevator, I have the tendency to call upon myself for aid. Though, at this junction, the case was not this. I eventually peeled my wet face from the pile of papers and from my computer screen. I picture it now like running through a field of tall grass as a storm brews in the distance; I moved over to my boyfriend, who was in his usual spot at his desk, and wrapped myself around him like a boa constrictor.

   As the abyss whirls around my head, undefined and majestic, I tend to look up at it. The origin point of this abyss is my not getting caught up in my specific life and rather observing what exists around me. However, if I am to focus on that idea, I negate the point. I'd also like to touch on my original idea for this recount, the imminence of death, but I will save that for a following note.