Sometimes, too, he stared around In a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence, none of it was any longer real.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
This is
She stands in the doorway. Her blue dress fits loosely around her small bodice and hangs just barely above her scraped knees. Her mustard yellow scarf with tribal designs is looped once, maybe twice around her neck and now billows over her chest. Her hair is in a disorganized bun with long curls that have fallen out of the knot and are now draping her neck and back.
She begins to make her way across the dark grey-carpeted room towards her desk in the middle of the front row. She looks like poetry, and walks like a waltz. Her arms, small but strong, hang by her side, swaying gently with opposite motion of her legs trudging forward. One hand grasps the notebooks that contain her every thought, each significant and angelic in the way it is written, and the way it is thought. She slowly puts her things on the desk, so quietly that no one can hear her soft movements.
Her large green eyes are fixed on a stain on the floor just five feet from where she is sitting. They don’t move, don’t blink. They stay fixed; they stay there, as if searching for every misstep she’s taken, though they aren’t her fault. They stay fixed, they stay there, for she’s trying to see every answer to the questions that remain unanswered and overlooked, but alas, she finds none. Within that stain on the floor she’s determining if she’s good or evil, if she’s flight of fight. As she sits, her eyes stay fixed, and nervous thought run in her head.
She is-
a sometimes quiet individual.
Those Who Don’t
Those who don’t know any better come into the festival located on a field covered in dead leaves and dried dunegrass and give us dirty looks while passing judgement. They think we are all ignorant. They think all we know how to do is smoke, dance, and hula hoop. They are arrogant people who have bought these tickets and come to the festival for one band only.
But we don’t feel inferior. We know the woman with full armpit hair is the mother of Magnolia, the 12 year-old mandolin player, and the elderly man playing accordian, that’s Kurt Westie, and in the tent next to him is Crazy Legs, but he’s not actually crazy, he’s just happy.
All hippies, all around, we are proud. But watch us hike into a white-washed industrial city and our eyes go into a mad hunt for trees, and our ears ache for any sound other than a car starting. Yes. This is how our lives go.
On and on.
