"alice, whatever it is, maybe you're not the one who's lost...or missing. maybe it just needs to find its own way to you, in due time. and until then, you're just gonna have to find enough solace in this damn cat."
•••
in which the lack of a girl's...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
❦
LENA october 17 2008
It seems as if I'm at a standstill. Moving so quickly, my legs are but a blur below me as I skim the forest floor. So quickly that as I pass the trees, they're nothing but a short strip of color in my vision. I don't have to wrestle my way through the wind as it whips and roars around me, all I have to do is mindlessly weave my way through.
At this speed, it should sound as if I'm deforesting my path. However, my precise steps are denying me of the satisfaction of hearing such. I'm painfully silent, weightless—leaving no trace of destruction in my wake. It's too easy for me to focus on the sound of my thoughts.
I'm nothing but a sharp wisp of air that could take up but a fragment of someone's vision as I pass. Maybe they would think an eyelash fell in their eye—blink it away a few times and it's gone and that's that.
Why would anything have changed this time? How could I expect that one day, I would just out of the blue be anything but inadequate? With no one but myself to prove anything to, it's quite foolish of me to believe this would be the time.
There's a gap of trees straight ahead, due to lack of ground beneath. I can hear the water below as its thunder rolls against the rocks and echoes out across the sea.
"Lena!" He calls out, but his voice is distant, a mile behind me.
I push myself, harder than I should, and in less than a second I'm soaring over the edge and letting go of the control I was just so focused on.
The wind catches up to me before I crash through the water and it feels like a string is tugging at my body from above, straining to pull me back up. In an instance, I'm underwater and everything is dramatically slowed down. I take this time to slowly let out the air I was holding while I push myself away from the surface, sinking, wanting to stay under the water where everything seems to be frozen. A sharp contrast from where I was moments beforehand.
I'm quickly brought back to reality as I allow the waves beneath the surface to take hold of me. I'm trying desperately to ignore the urge to move. I wanna feel human right now. It's like a high—I get to push myself as far as I possibly can just to crash into a heavy surreal low, and then it's back to normal. I'm back on earth and have no control.
Except I do have control—too much of it. So much, that once I make the slightest effort to move upwards, the water around me is still. As waves crash around me and riptides pull beneath me, I'm still.
And I don't want to be. I long to be able to be pulled down, to feel the burning in my lungs as water floods in. To feel that skip of a heartbeat before adrenaline tears through your body, prepared to do anything humanly possible to get your head above water and keep you afloat.
