My Future Self

MY FUTURE SELF

The little girl lies in bed, enveloped in her powder pink quilt. The ruffles that boarder it touch up against her face, grazing her white skin. As she sleeps, her chest crawls up and down, the depth of her natural breath allowing her to ease motionless into her dream. Her blond curls lay gently atop her white pillow case, her head tilted to the side, as if she were whispering out to someone.

I look at her, and I look at me. She is me. She is who I once was. She is young, she is pure, she is innocent.

I sit atop her windowsill, looking in at her, envying her beauty. I once was beautiful, but here I am, old, wrinkled, sitting on the doorstop of death, the inevitable slowly chasing after me. Seeing her, I try to remember all that will come, all that awaits her. I dig into my brain. I recall times with friends, laughing so hard I thought my lungs would collapse; I recall passionate moments with my husband, and other calm moments, sleeping aside him, back to back, an invisible rope of tranquil love connecting us. I recall the birth of my own daughter, and see a reflection of her in myself lying in bed. I look at my young self, and clasp my hands together, feeling the looseness of the skin around my knuckles, and the roughness that age has bestowed on me.

I sit on the windowsill and feel the night’s breeze around me. I look outside the window, realizing that this moment will end, that I will awake and no longer experience this future. I will escape from the intense melancholy wrapped around the knowledge that it will all end so soon. 

I feel the breeze slide over my face as I slowly awake. I sit up in bed and let out a gentle yawn. The softness of my mattress and the heat that resides between my body and blanket comfort me. I sit up, wiping my eyes and itching my scalp under my light blond curls. I look toward the windowsill and see where I once was. I feel my future self, all of her soon-to-be lost memories floating around her, giving her a false wisdom that will slowly fade into emptiness.

I walk toward the window, and look out at the stars. I choose one, a ball of golden sparkles, and glare as the recently-awakened-child fog loiters upon me. I close my eyes, surrounded by the darkness of nothingness, and make a wish. I then walk back to bed, and eager to return to my tender sleep.

A Black Dot Below

A BLACK DOT BELOW

It’s a beautiful Tuesday afternoon. I’m sitting under my favorite oak tree at Thealer Park, book in hand, with a slight breeze gliding over my body. The leaves provide me with uneven patches of shade, covering some of me, leaving other parts of me exposed to the soft sun, wrapped around pieces of my wan skin.

I look up from my book to the soccer field on the other side of the park. Young boys run around kicking the ball furiously, as if all that existed in the world were them, the ball, and the goal. Looking at them, I can taste their energy as they give all they can, as they reach out for the potential success, each one visualizing making that goal. Such naivety.

I turn back to my book, bored with another mystery novel. Another day, another nothing. I loiter around, living a silence, my head empty of words. Meaninglessness surrounds me, tickling me with apathy as I drag through time. It is me, the sun, my insignificant book, and the senselessly hopeful boys that form my universe.

I hold my book loosely in my hands and take a deep breath. I hear a noise. It’s squeaky, high-pitched, irritating my ears for a brief moment. “Hey you!” it shouts. “Hey you!” I look all around me, expecting to see a deranged three-year-old alien running toward me, but I am alone under my tree. The only others in sight are the soccer players and a few picnickers at a distance.

I hear the noise again. I look down, and there is a queen ant resting in the jagged shadow of a leaf. “No,” I whisper to myself. But lo and behold, I hear it again “Yes yes yes!” says the voice back to me. And I swear to fucking God, it is coming right from the queen ant below me.

I feel my body heat up and my heart race, the panic of being utterly insane infusing me. “Yes, it’s me talking” says the shrilling voice. “No, you’re not crazy…you are just hearing me.” I look down at the ant. No, there are no lips moving (even I know that ants have no lip). But something in her body shakes, almost vibrating, as the voice comes out of her.

“I am not hearing an ant, I am not hearing an ant” I whisper to myself. I try to move, to get up, run away from this squeaky creature, from my unhinged self. But I am frozen, bolted down by my racing heart and my bewildered state.

The ant continues to speak. “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m not supposed to talk to you, or to anyone really. But today, I had a realization. The average lifespan of an ant is sixty days. Barely two months, can you believe it? And here, I’ve been alive forty-five days….my time is running short, needless to say. So I want to talk, I want to be heard.”

“But don’t you talk to your other ants?” I respond. I feel the heat escaping me, a coolness taking over me as my body begins to relax. I accept my peculiar situation, and that I am speaking to an ant.

“Yes,” she replies, “But it’s always the same with them. All they talk about is food, food, food… ‘Smell out the area, grab it, and bring it home’ they tell me over and over again. When they’re not talking about food, it’s building. ‘Gather dirt, pebbles, and build, build, build.’ It’s all so necessary, yet so banal. I just want to run away sometimes, but food and building, for as much as I despise them, are all I know, all I am capable of. Kind of a catch 22 I suppose.”

I look down at the ant, her black skin glistening in the sun, her words pulsating from her body and shining like glitter in the air. “I know what you mean” I respond back to her. The ant and I sit in silence for a bit. “I feel the same way sometime, too, you know,” I tell the ant. “Like everyone around me, they inanely go through the steps of everyday, and for what? Why? What’s the point? But then I see myself going through those same steps, and realize that I’m no different from them.”

We sit in silence a bit longer. Then, I look down toward the ant, wanting to ask her her name. But she is no longer there. I look back at the soccer players, and collect my book. I lift myself up, brushing the dirt off my pants as I ready myself to head back to work, having far exceeded my lunch break once again. As I walk to my car, I see an ant hill lying in the thin, dying brown grass along the sidewalk. I feel a connection with the hill, with the perplexity of the ants inside of it, realizing that we are more united than I had ever believed. As I walk on I allow my shoe to slide over the ant hill, demolishing the home and all that reside in it. Some may say this is a heartless thing to do. But, I am a human, and to destroy those weaker than me, well, for as ugly as that is, it is part me.