Ten Minute Write - Tumblr Posts

ten minute write day 2 (yeah i know i took a 2 week break)

ive been trying to find a liminal space that feels like the ones from my childhood

you know, how it felt being at school at night when everyone had gone home

or how it felt to stand in the church sanctuary when everyone had left

or the elementary school playground on the weekends

and i used to feel a certain holiness in those spaces, in the places that we built for togetherness now full of emptiness and only my own voice echoing against the walls. Keeping me in. i never dreamed that the opposite: an inhuman place suddenly filled with me, would feel anything but uncomfortable and interrupted.

I climbed a mountain last weekend. It was raining on and off, so the air was still, and the birds were hiding, and it was too far up for the large, whistling, singing, strumming bugs. the fragile alpine zone, they called it. my family walked off down the slope to look over the ravine. I stayed behind.

it was so quiet. I've never been in such quiet. I could hear my breath and my heartbeat and if i had stayed still enough, for long enough, I would have heard the blood moving through my veins.

This is the opposite of what I had found in those spaces humans had built. Staring out at the pristine, preserved mountainside, i found myself feeling so tiny, and so huge at the same time. I looked down at the sweeping valley below, and down at my feet in boots that i dragged out of the darkest recesses of my closet for this, and out into the sky, shrouded with clouds that I was now standing inside.

it was so quiet. so quiet. no rushing of machinery. No hum of electricity. no one upstairs rattling around, no children down the street shouting. All things i usually find comfort in. all things i realized i might not miss.

i get it, now. why people just disappear into the mountains. that silence is addictive. that sense of peace leaves an ache in your soul the moment your family comes back around the cairns, rattling keychains and crunching boots. that is the holy silence i will be looking for forever, that is the liminal space i will stand in for as long as i am allowed.

Ten minute write while I wait for my train day 3/?

I really hate the subway. It’s grimy. It’s often late. It’s loud as hell and overwhelming. It’s filled with weird people who stare at me or try to talk to me. It’s not actually all that cheap, though it is much cheaper than driving.

Every so often I see people on the train I know I’ll never see again. And then I see them again the next day, or a few weeks later, or a month or two later. I wonder if they remember me the way I remember them. The girl with the black and red hair and striking eyes and big headphones. The tall woman with the cream colored dress. The man who spent the whole hour-plus ride sitting up straight, staring straight ahead, looking at nothing, listening to nothing, his hands folded neatly in his lap. I wonder who I would be to them. The girl fiddling with her rings? The girl giggling at something on her podcasts? The girl who smiled at them on their way home? I wonder.

If the train was made of little moments like this, tiny connections where the world is suddenly cozier because oh right, I have seen you before, and you were soft and kind, then the train and I might get along better. But instead it clangs the loudest bell I’ve heard and it echoes through the tunnel and I cover my ears like a child while it approaches.

It is something I do not miss on weekends or holidays. But sitting here, watching the town fly by, I find myself wondering about the mother and her young daughter who used to read to one another every morning. I hope they are happy. I doubt they think about me.