helio365isms

We huddled outside on the pavement, cursing the damp cold of the night and wishing we had the warmth of our beds instead of just the warmth of our bodies. The risk was too great to chance an escape back into comfort; we kept our distance, imagining with envy the sleepers in their homes around us, obliviously enjoying a privilege we had taken for granted. None of us could muster even the semblance of a good mood.

Presently, when it became apparent that the near future would not afford us an opportunity for return, our pack dissolved into looser gatherings that drifted off in search of safe lodging. Where was a dark place? A soft place? A quiet place? Was there even such a thing anymore? We hoped fervently, moving quickly to stake out our claims before others arrived. The compatriots we had, moments ago, felt as close to as only brothers and those in danger can were now competitors. Small spikes of adrenaline chased away the lethargy we had spent half the night building up in our slumber.

No, there was no perfect refuge to be found, but everyone willing to settle for less found a way to sneak into other residences and make space to lay down their tired bodies. A small number forewent sleeping quarters and chose to keep vigil while the rest of us lost consciousness; it was they who ushered us home later, still wretchedly lacking in rest. We had never had a worse night.

We were in the same room for maybe two hours. It wasn’t much. He was completely different from anyone I’d ever met, and completely out of my league, that much was immediately apparent. Skinny jeans, a v-neck sweater, dreads all the way down his back and charisma shooting out of his eyes like laser beams. He loved soccer and flute beatboxing. As a person, he was just too chill for me.

But as a musician - it was euphoric, listening to him play. I could have wept. I knew the pitfalls he was navigating; I had wrestled with those same obstacles he pinned down so expertly and tied up with a bow. I’d never known anyone who equaled me in that respect, much less anyone who beat me hands down. It was incredible. I think I might have been staring.

Half an hour into his talk, he stopped mid-sentence, looked me dead in the eye and asked “I’m sorry, but do you play the flute?” Out of a room full of musicians, he singled me out as a comrade in arms - how or why, I do not know, besides his vague explanation that I looked like I knew what he was talking about. Boy, was I smitten. I cannot remember a single time when I have been happier for a whole day. I didn’t care that I’d never see him again. I didn’t care that he didn’t even know my name. I just wanted to make music with him.

It happened - oh, I don’t know, just the other night. I stuck out my arms and lifted my chin, stood on the balls of my feet, and spun. The more I pulled in my hands to my body, the faster I turned, and it wasn’t long before I had so much momentum that I didn’t even need to push myself with one foot anymore.

It wasn’t as dizzying as you’d think, but I won’t pretend it was calming. The world was rushing past in a blur of colors and edges, and it was all I could do to keep my eyes straight ahead and spin - I’m sure I would have hurt my neck if I’d tried to spot like ballerinas do to keep their balance. I was going too fast at that point to devote thought to it, anyway. I was going too fast to think about much of anything, really, which is probably why I didn’t notice when I floated up a little.

I must have floated, because I realized suddenly that I wasn’t spinning on the ground anymore - I was rotating so quickly that I’d simply begun to fly. It wasn’t particularly controlled flight, I admit, and it was entirely dependent on momentum to keep me in the air, but I was generating negligible friction, so who knows? I could’ve floated indefinitely if I hadn’t been so jarred by the realization that I stopped spinning. Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow night after I fall asleep.

There was a ledge, long and narrow and sticking out of the rest of the world, like the cover art on “Where the Sidewalk Ends.” I was flat on my stomach over the nothingness below where this particular sidewalk ended - except it was more a fragment of what was once a building than a sidewalk. The predominant materials were slabs of concrete and steel beams; gutted buildings poured their insulation out of fragmented cinder block walls. It was dark, or at least the sky was gray, and the world seemed to have forgotten what colors looked like.

I had two columns to hide behind, and the surrounding debris formed a bottleneck that forced anyone trying to approach me to follow a narrow, completely visible pathway to a small clearing in front of my ledge. The clearing and my position were just barely within earshot of each other. It was the perfect spot for a last stand.

First came trained officials with bulletproof vests and bargains. After the first few bodies were slumped on the beginning of my ledge, they passed the megaphones off to my friends and family. One by one, they walked around their dead compatriots to reach me. I felled them all. They were defenseless. There was no sound besides the crack of my rifle - what came out of the megaphones had long since ceased to be intelligible to me over my tears, if I had ever paid attention to it at all.

I woke up.

In the tiniest of moments, lives can slide past each other. Opportunities that flare up for a fraction of a second are lost in a brush of elbows, a glance, a nod. A walking away. Such chance encounters, brief as they are, open a window into the life of another person, through which those lucky enough to witness it can poke in their heads and have a look around.

Though all parties involved almost certainly have led rich lives (it can’t be avoided, experiences are foisted upon us even if we merely exist passively) that glimpse, which spans maybe a heartbeat at most, can be telling. We often drop our guards when we walk along sidewalks, lost in thought; it simply never seems worth the effort to hide things from strangers. Why bother? It’s not like you’ll ever see them again.

Thus, we unwittingly show them more - moods, states of mind, fleeting ideas, ponderances - than we might put on display for even our circle of friends.

It’s an opening that is taken advantage of less than it should be. What if peoplewatching were consciously cultivated? How perceptive, how socially adept would we become? What kinds of cues would we begin to notice that never stood out to us before? At the very least, it would be an exercise in imagination to look at a person once and extrapolate a life and a personality from it. We might even learn a thing or two about ourselves in the process.

A day at the circus. Who will you see? Do the stilts catch your eye, or the trapeze artists? The colorful clowns are certainly trying to get your attention - they’re signaling the next act. A band of marauders strides onto the mats! Those gauntlets - those helmets - vikings!

A count of four and away they go, tearing across the stage, narrowly avoiding head-on collisions in their frenzied sprint. They grimace, they stalk, they line up and roll through each others’ legs - their fierce roundoffs are a sight to see! One by one, they speed past, flipping head over heels at top speed, perhaps in competition with each other, perhaps simply to exercise their viking muscles. Before long, they are in hand-to-hand combat, leaping under and over each other, dodging blows by cartwheeling out of the way, being kicked into backbends and using each other as springboards. Their differences reconciled, they band together to row their longboat straight into two feast halls with mead aplenty; while the more ambitious ride steeds at each other and roughhouse from on top of shoulders, the majority are toasting their brethren and roaring their approval from behind overflowing drinking horns.

These are vikings! Not the bearded warriors history books depict, but legging-clad and content to tumble with nerf weapons rather than inflict serious harm. These vikings are raucous and grinning, these vikings are having more fun than should be possible in battle! Surely, these are true vikings! Surely, this is the circus.

She lives in a house with fifty words for happiness, and fifty for sorrow - only no one remembers the sad ones anymore. Her house is made of colors and the smell of fresh laundry. All of the windows are rose-tinted.

He lives in a house with fifty words for play, and fifty for work, but the latter have been lost to time. The house is made of puzzles and the sound of compliments and inside, it’s always a hard day’s night.

They met on the way to a mutual friend’s tea party and talked about what it feels like to wrestle in the spring mud. Their hats sported matching ribbons. The tea party turned into kite flying, then bike riding, then eating a picnic dinner on his wraparound porch, shielded from the onslaught of the returning rain. She found that he could only see in a few contrasting colors - he didn’t even have a concept of the thousands of shades she could distinguish between. He found that she didn’t like to think about bad things, even if it could lead to a solution. They parted on a sour note, and the taste clung to their teeth for days.

Now, she’s pulled some sad words from behind a bookshelf, and he’s traded in some playful problem-solving for the vocabulary of labor. They’ve swapped some windows. He’s fixed a burgundy she hadn’t noticed was leaking. Their spouses are friends. Secretly, they’ve resolved to be less stubborn in their next lives.

Dear Stranger,

I liked your ponytail from the moment I saw you stepping down to the podium. It was sleek and black, understated. Quiet. Your demeanor when you turned around to introduce yourself and your work to us matched it.

I understood nothing of the language you read in, but the sound of your voice folded itself around the syllables such a natural, beautiful way that I felt like I caught some of the poetry anyway. Your reading had none of the pomp that others built up around their Latin and Greek classics. It wasn’t stilted or stylized; it simply was.

Your translation, from what I saw in the program, dissolved the conventional haiku syllable count in favor of a more organic transition into your mother tongue. I was enchanted by it, and by how you read your work - like you would hold an infant, cradling it in the crook of your arm and treading softly. I wanted to reach out and feel its tiny fingers close around my thumb.

I want you to know that what you did, the pause you made room for in an otherwise boisterous symposium, was so peaceful that I return to the memory of it to sit a while and listen when I feel overwhelmed. I like to hear you measure out your words and speak them cleanly and precisely, in due time. I like to watch your ponytail retreat back up the steps and turn around to sit down. I like you.

Show me what you see when you go somewhere else, inside yourself. Tell me what you touch, what you taste. I know that you leave sometimes - I can tell when you slip away - but I can only guess at your destination; your past is as fantastical a land as your imagination, to me. Is the look on your face years hence or worlds hence? When will you come back?

Let me into the broom cupboards of your mind. I want to be in the places you visit infrequently, the places you only go when you need something from them, or need to lock yourself away for a time. I want to become that place you lock yourself away to, or, failing that, at least be friends with it.

I know that my crawlspaces are wrapped in, lined with, and shaped by things that you may never understand, but I will share them all with you if you ask, because I want you to have everything good that I can give you, and they are the best I have to give. Also, because I have this timid hope that some of it will end up as your cushion next time you need to inhabit your space.

Show me what you do when you go somewhere else, inside yourself. Tell me what you need and want, so that I can tell who you are. I know that you will leave, sometimes. I do not know when you will come back.

Water beat down her back. She scrubbed her sudsy foot vigorously. The curtain to the next shower over crinkled shut, and Potterfield started humming the first few bars of Dona Nobis.

It had been a complicated day, and parts of it had involved rearranging her schedule entirely, which was always a headache. Oh, for a world without stupidly strenuous tasks. She valued showers for the mindless productivity they allowed her to slip into - a steady rhythm of washing and rinsing that took only the accumulated habits accumulated of a lifetime, not brainpower. Anything to lessen the death grip her daily grind kept on her brain.

Grappling with a runaway schedule hadn’t been the only near-catastrophe; she’d given a massage until her fingers turned into wood, and getting them back into their usual pliability had been challenging. It wasn’t every day she had to wrestle a belligerent schedule to the ground with a handicap of fingers made of oak - she was sure she’d find bruises from it, once she finished scraping off the layer of mud that had also accumulated during the scuffle.

Potterfield started Dona Nobis over, and she joined in. That was another sweet, semi-mindless pleasure, singing in the shower. She wondered whether any of it did any good - the work, the fingers - and chuckled.

“Is it my singing?” Potterfield threw over the barrier between the stalls.

“Oh, no,” she assured him, “My head is questioning menial labor again. Absurd! Who doesn’t love that stuff?”

The girl reclines on her bed, one arm flung behind her. It’s impossible to tell whether her thoughts are racing a thousand miles away or spinning languidly in the comfort of the moment. Sunlight spills in and gets spun into her hair, bleaching it a shade blonder.

Dirty dishes sit on the counter, savoring the afternoon, and the lighter fabrics wave in agreement from their hangers, prompted by a breeze from the same windows that let in the sunlight. Time becomes mired in the peace of the room; it grinds to a halt somewhere around 4:17. Even the walls hold their breath, waiting for the promise of music, laughter, and more occupants to fulfill itself.

Time will break free of the tranquility and race away, giggling madly, and there will be too much excitement for things like clothes swaying in a draft to be noticed. Sensory experiences will contract into a knot so tight that it seems that the only possible end is explosion - but another pool of stillness will open up, and the mess will unravel gently as time relaxes again.

The girl will drift, caught in the eddies of time until she encounters a pool with no end. Time itself will absorb her; she will become a part of the notion sometimes called The Past. Parts of her time will be resurrected as time sweeps them up in its circular path, but she will never be recreated exactly as she was. Nothing is ever the same twice.

Any forward-thinking person develops potential courses of action in case of emergency; fire escape routes, inclement weather evacuation possibilities, and the like. Often, particularly effective guidelines are disseminated to promote calm efficiency, should a troublesome situation arise. I propose the following battle plan for horrid weather:

1. Avoid going outside as much as humanly possible. (If the elements must be braved, put on the most cheerfully colored appropriate clothing available, and make a game of jumping in puddles or crunching through snowdrifts. Surrender to the inevitable cold and sogginess that will follow; fighting is futile and will only increase frustration.)

2. Create extra-comfy conditions inside to counterbalance the extra-nasty conditions outside. This may include hot chocolate, blankets, pillows, bathrobes, certain kinds of music, and/or general lazing about and napping - whatever suits personal taste and weather type. Make sure that enough towels, warm drinks, roasted marshmallows, or other appropriate paraphernalia is at hand to welcome intrepid souls who ventured out of doors.

3. Provide ample distraction from the gloomy pall of miserable weather. Feel-good movies and engrossing novels work wonderfully, as does socializing with good friends. Bonus points for snuggles. Board games, card games, and any game that can be played indoors are excellent for passing the time with a group of people; cooking can also be a productive bonding activity, and tends to have a tasty end result that can boost morale if consumed immediately.

Of course, personalized methods can supplement these points to thoroughly erase bad weather blues.

There was once a house far removed from its compatriots, which dearly wished to become a home. It was visited one day by an exhausted tower that had been traveling for too long and was badly in need of upkeep. The two struck a mutually beneficial deal.

This tower, when it fixed itself to the house, became a cheery alcove lit entirely by the row of windows just under its eaves. Its floor was swallowed by the knee-deep cushion of pillows and blankets that lived in it, and humans flocked to its belly to hold conversations over aromatic teas; to paint and paint over murals; to read and reread their favorite books.

They took care to maintain the tower’s legacy of comfort, and each successive occupant inherited greater expectations and put forth a greater effort to meet them. Indeed, some denizens found that curating the tower began to consume their lives as they planned ever more lavish events and installed ever more intricate decorations.

After absorbing lives for centuries, the tower began to regain its own life. When it was left empty one summer, its cushions crept into the rest of the room and the scent of tea wafted out in the afternoons. Its cozy atmosphere became self-perpetuating. Freed of its dependency upon humans, it flew a kite out of one of its windows to test the wind, and then took to the skies, leaving its home behind.

Before long, it happened upon a house in need of a tower.

Little things are what make all the difference. For any activity you engage in, be it working or playing or both, what makes a task well done - and what makes valuable free time excellent fun - is attention to detail. The big picture is important as well, but taking time to make sure there are no rough edges and no loose ends makes for a very satisfying end result. Smaller tasks can break gigantic projects down into a series of less daunting goals, too. Example:

Take a venture as complex as a relationship. It may feel like the most elaborate amorous display you can muster is in order, but how to do it safely? The surest killer of such ambitions is, unfortunately, omnipresent: reaching out to someone else by necessity also involves the risk of rejection. It is an inescapable fact that showing kindness leaves you open to pain; that has to be taken in stride.

Could we make it easier to trust each other, be less judgmental? Probably. But over time, the small kindnesses with the small and harmless rejection risks add up into grander expressions than we could have imagined. Doing something radical is often easier than we think, even it if takes longer than we think. After all, though it may seem totally counterintuitive, vulnerability does enable the growth of affection, just as endearments of the smallest kind are the first step to enormous gestures. Life doesn’t have to be extravagant; all you need is guts.

Friday night. My friends are taking me out to that sweet new club downtown. This is going to take some serious sartorial consideration.

Okay, I haven’t worn this top I got for my birthday in a while, and it would go super well with - oh right, and my feather necklace with the turquoise - and the fringed leather shoes that are kind of moccasin-inspired!

Hm. Something is missing.

Oh my god, I know! This object of cultural appropriation that essentializes a subjugated population by perpetuating a degrading stereotype! It totally flatters my white privilege, right? I just can’t get over how well it desecrates something that is deeply sacred to these people while at the same time evoking their long (and continuing) legacy of genocide, oppression, and colonization - all in addition to situating those tragedies firmly in the past, when this suffering is in fact very much alive in the present.

I mean, isn’t it totally hot that something I think is a mere fashion choice is actually rooted in a huge power structure that trivializes minority cultures, and that even people’s ignorance about everything that’s wrong with this incredibly trendy accessory is a function of this hierarchical structure? It’ll be out of style next season, but for now, this whole culture is just so… I don’t know, trendy! In such a disposable way!

Oops, getting dressed took more time than I planned for. Better check this Indian headdress one last time in the mirror and head out!

Hello, life! I’m new here. We should be friends, yes?

Okay, I’ll start: I like dancing the night away but also reading in nestlike pillow/sheet forts for irresponsibly long periods of time. I am a sucker for quality bread - the severity of my addiction to fresh bread with butter is so intense that I most likely shouldn’t tell you about it right off the bat. Oh well. While I’m at it, I’ll confess that I’m also entirely too ticklish for my own good, and easily seduced by small kindnesses. (Know that if you use any of this against me, I will deny everything and make up outrageous stories about the time you were so tongue-tied over a girl that you couldn’t say no a please-will-you-wear-this-diaper request and then wore nothing but the diaper to impress her.)

I like to learn things, so if you want to teach me, I’ll try my hardest to be open-minded! A word of warning: I’ve been known to get knuckleheaded about convoluted problems - I tend to keep working on them regardless of how feasible finding a solution is and how grouchy it makes me. It’s a failing of mine. Other failings include difficulty backing down from challenges, slightly overblown optimism, and intense pet peeves (like the clicking sound of people picking their fingernails, and the smacking sound of people eating with their mouths open).

Other than that, I just generally try to make my environment a happier place. What do you do, exactly?

Evenings, before I knew how hard my parents worked and how arduous their days were compared to mine, there were few greater joys than sitting down at the dinner table and having the pasta pot set down before me. I’m sure other things were cooked in that pot, but for me, in those moments before the lid lifted, everything else in the world fell away except for my fervent belief that the pot contained pasta - and not just any pasta! The simplest of spaghetti dishes: plain, with butter and salt. On days when the pasta pot made good on its promise, I was queen.

After it became apparent to me that cooking dinner was merely one in a long line of tasks for my parents, I valued the dish not only for its taste but also its simplicity. It was still a treat for me to have my mom purposely make my favorite food and not my brother’s, but I also felt that I was giving back in some way by not requesting anything tricky. The comfort of this imagined reciprocity blended with my already positive concept of the spaghetti for a deliciously feel-good concoction.

These days, I make my own. I savor the adult-ness of cooking for myself away from home; that feeling of shiny new independence lends the soft nostalgia of the pasta a freshness I haven’t associated with it before. Its aftertaste is as emotional as it is gustatory.

Spaghetti: a dish best served over time.

One generous pint of sunshine, approximately, and a good dollop of blue to dissolve it in - that’s what a perfect sky takes. It’s best to combine them in a darkroom, so you can be sure they’re uncontaminated when you turn them loose.

Then you’ll have to bottle some of your breath for exactly the right breeze to waft gently over a pulse measured in the slap of bare feet on packed dirt. Don’t worry about it being too hot or cold, or too strong or diffuse; just make sure that it’s full of life, and the rest will follow.

Prepare a moon a few days in advance such that you can harvest its glitter from the surface of water to sow in the lucky eyes of those that will reap the benefits of your work. Weave your fingers into the coarse plush of their hair and hold it back so they can see your kind smile, and can breathe the care you took while crafting this moment.

Place on their tongues the taste of a happiness so great and so elusive that, when you finally managed to lure it out of the corners of faces creased from past mirth, you could use nothing but the strength of your hope to chain it (for its indomitable spirit would surely have beat itself to death on the bars of any cage).

Now the hardest part: let go. Send your masterpiece out for someone else to enjoy, and start over. Every day.

If I decide to be strong; if I fix in my mind only the possibility of success; if I disregard the apparent insanity of my actions; if I ignore the instinct to simply slow down, stop, turn aside, be safe; if I kick my fear in the gut and thumb my nose at it;-

I must not be afraid. I must not stop.

- if I trust in myself; if I stay in control; if I block out worry, noise, motion, pain; if my concentration is as ironclad as my determination; if I forget for a moment that I am merely human-

I must not be afraid. I must believe.

- then I am free. Then I am free to fly as I wish, to dive, to run, to fight - to win! Then I am free to indulge in joy such that I am destroyed by it, or confidence such that I become invincible instead. In that moment, everything is open to me.

I must not be afraid. I must be free.

And in the moments when I am not everything - in the many moments when I am nothing at all - I must gather my strength and build my indignation: it is unacceptable to be dominated by gravity or common sense, or to allow fear to determine my actions! In these moments, when I am recovering from the ravages of freedom, I must already be marshaling my forces for the next battle. There can be no rest.

For two hours now, I have been grappling with a particular paper. I thought I had wrestled it to the ground ten minutes in, but it threw me as soon as I became distracted. We’ve been at it ever since.

Within the past few minutes, the paper has adopted a new strategy; its letters have begun dissolving their edges and floating just outside of my field of vision. I am loath to admit it, but the tactic works. With great concentration, I can still manage to pin them in place, but I the fact of the matter is that I am outnumbered. I shall be overwhelmed soon.

Already, they have begun playing tricks on me. I suspect that they can smell their imminent victory, and that this is making them overconfident. Perhaps they will become complacent? I have not give up hope yet, though I can no longer tell when the letters are swimming around and when they have stayed in place - even the most placidly immobile words look as if they have been rearranged when my eyes return to them from a saccade.

It is tragically unavoidable that I must inflate the letters’ ranks even as they conspire to overthrow me; I know that they aim to drive me mad, but I must continue writing until I cross the actual threshold of madness (I assume that I will be relieved of my duties vis-a-vis word counts at that point).

Friends, this is academia. There is no turning back.