Requiem [COMPLETED]

Feeling Like You Belong, Feeling Alone

[Sigrid P.O.V.]

In the long winters everything was white, brown, gray and violet. The sky was often low and steel-gray that shadowed the skiffs and ice crust so that everything looks like a mottled bruise or a muddy watercolor. At other times the sky was such a watercolor of pale blues that it seemed like everything would simply fade away if you stared up too long, blurring out of focus and out of reach. Snow drifted in the wind, blowing across the roads and forming patches of ice, thin and nearly opalescent. The blown snow left bare patches of soil in the fields like pothole lakes, while snow drifted steeply against the windrows and buildings. Even on a sunny day, the winter sunsets looked like collages of tropical colors, a reminder of lurid summer colors that slipped away in minutes as you froze trying to hold onto the moment until the cold and the dark chased you back inside. It made me lonely. Facing the space made me more aware, uncomfortably aware of myself, constantly confronted by my own feeling of emptiness. It isn't surprising that I always preferred aloneness or being with Sven, which was much like being alone anyway. Most kids thought we were a little strange. I suppose we were.

I wondered as a child about many things that adults found awkward to answer; they didn't seem to want to believe that young minds could think deeply on any subject. It almost seemed sometimes like they were scared of us, in a way, so Sven and I took to talking over things just between ourselves. We'd talk about anything, any ideas we could think of as long as it wasn't a personal question, debating the possibility of each solution until we decided on one and then fleshed out our own imaginary answer. At least it kept us occupied. And we could trust each other as sounding boards more so than adults that waved away things they didn't want to think about. One of the most memorable questions was Sven's: "If God is everything, infinite, omnipresent, how was there room for him to create everything else? How could he create the world, the universe, when he was already filling all existence with himself?"

The beginning of the bible doesn't talk about it, but how can he create ever more things when he's filling the whole room, so to speak? It was a good paradox; we always enjoyed that type of problem the most. Eventually we decided that the first thing that actually happened--before creation began--isn't mentioned because it's not a positive act of creating. It was a negative action. God had to withdraw himself from the space that was, creating God within Himself and space separate from God, like sucking in your gut. Then in that empty space he could create something other than God, he could make all those other things that he does in Genesis, the world and animals and people. Withdrawal into himself, retreating into space separate from what would become our dark nothingness of space, was a kind of removal necessary for free will, for the type of world that he wanted to set in motion. There had to be space for there to be us. So he shifted and made way. It was kind of like how later he separates light and dark, removing the dark so that the light can be seen. Later of course, we discovered in college that philosophers had come up with this one long before us, but at the time it seemed like the world's greatest epiphany. It probably was for a 14 and an 11 year old.

So anyhow, we decided that it follows that for there to be separate people, there needs to be space for them, between them; the often near-silent farm left plenty of room for us to develop quietly, our minds expanding far beyond it's reaches. We had been given such a bounty of space by God that we over-developed some things, perhaps. The end of the world was right over the horizon, separating us from everyone and everything else. The farm, the world. The silence also kept us apart, like planets in different orbits that never quite overlapped. It kept us from sharing things that would have made us understand each other.

The idea of removal made sense to me because when I was silent suddenly, pulling myself out of being absorbed in an activity, the world always rushed into the gap. When I'd be at school in the middle of class, sometimes I'd just stop what I was doing. Looking around quietly, the sounds of other kids' pens and pencils amplified, the teacher's voice more distinct. I could smell the chalk dust in the air along with the particular odor of the linoleum floors. The buzz of the florescent lights overhead, the wind buffeting the school and throwing dry snow against the windows. The honk of geese overhead. Laughter and whispers erupting in the hallway now and then. It was as if someone turned up the intensity, the vividness. Pulling away left more room for everything else. Withdrawal somehow made things seem surreally vibrant.