Funny, the way the body works.
Lots of joints
and limbs,
swing swing swing.
Balls that creak.
Sockets that soar.
Shake hands,
cook food,
wash hands.
Wash hands one more time.
Wash hands one more time.
Wash hands one more time.
Funny, the way
the body works,
knocks on wood,
bumps into shoulders,
lies in bed,
stays there.
Sometimes I forget about this: for three years I grew up homeschooled in a van.
It was second to fourth grade. Lessons were taught on the road, taught by my mother as she would snap Trident peppermint gum while explaining concepts.
“You have to understand that what I’m about to tell you is putting you light years ahead of your peers,” she’d say, adjusting her scratched sunglasses. “America is first and foremost a shitty-- shit. We’re running out of gas.”
i.
I look up from my phone (opened to the News) and realize I’m no longer alone in my room. A bonfire flashes before my eyes. It’s young one, still feeding off of fresh wood, writhing out of control. Its body occasionally extends to my toes. My room feels otherworldly with dancing shadows that sway at the same rhythm as the flames. I rub my eyes.
It reaches out from its body to beckon to me in. The edge of its flame extends five little fingers as a shy greeting and I have the strongest urge to shake its hand, as if maybe its touch will feel like a cool balm. It’s silly. I know it’ll hurt.
When I look at the fire again, it has resumed its soulless shape. I turn back to my phone and keep scrolling.
ii.
How are wildfires born? I imagine it begins like a thought: circumstance, chance, and a bit of my own fault. Wind, a poorly kept campfire, a little bit of dryness, and a single persistent piece of glowing firewood -- that's all it takes to catch the world aflame. What a determination that last piece must have, waiting patiently for the hour in which it will grow thousands of times its size. A seed waiting for the world to provide it its due glory.
But imagine once it's grown -- it would be horrible for the people. What if I woke up to a fire in my room? How helpless would I be? The heat will press against my face and my eyes would open to a looming figure at my door. Between smoke and tears I'd watch it rapidly hug the periphery of my room, seep closer and closer until I cannot breathe. All of my previous thoughts at silly little bonfire events (“How much does fire weigh?” I had wondered) will seem absurd.
How crazy that a trivial thought, given time and circumstance, will grow so quickly. Left unkempt, a seed grows overnight into an inevitable beast. A beast that teasingly dances to a music I can't hear.
If I am to die this way, maybe I will shake its hand to see how it feels.
Entranced, the deer stops in her tracks,
captured by the moonlight in the forest.
It quivers,
then flickers off.
She flees, foliage in frantic flight,
tears dewing with confusion:
she fears the moon, the boom,
the foreign fire
in her heart.
Entranced, the deer
stops in her tracks, captured by
sleek, shining beauty --
so she flees,
foliage in
frantic flight. Hooves
crackle her untouched
wild heart which races
a handheld gun that shoots
but misses because she fears
that foreign fire in her heart:
she is a blur,
uncatchable.
Hello, all. It has been a long time since I made a post in my own normal voice. I wanted to speak into the general void about a new discovery I made in the past few months -- film.
As I've made it pretty clear on this blog, I have been deeply interested in literature and writing for as far back as I can remember, from storytelling journal entries I wrote in first grade to the "chapter book" I wrote in third grade to the various little stepping stones I've crossed to get to this point in time. There's no doubt that writing has drastically changed who I am, how I think, and how I view the world. In fact the word "drastic" isn't even the right word because it implies a sudden change. Writing, for me, has never been a novelty. It has been a lifelong companion.
Recently, however, a friend of mine introduced me to a YouTube channel called nerdwriter. Run by Evan Puschak, nerdwriter is a video essay channel that investigates film, creative arts, and history with a very evidence-driven lens. From there I learned about the detailed eye with which one can watch movies, such as through his analyses of "Arrival," a movie I really enjoyed but didn't specifically know why, among many other video essay film analyses. Although I knew film was an old (albeit much younger than writing) art form which has created many beautiful and life-shaping artworks, I don't think I fully understood the impact and artistic significance of the medium until I began watching these videos. Immediately intrigued, I looked into more film analysis channels and to my delight found some awesome channels like "Every Frame a Painting," "Lessons from the Screenplay," "Cinefix," and many others.
While writing is my most comfortable art form in which I feel able to express myself with the least resignation, I found myself utterly drawn and obsessed with the versatility, expressiveness, subtlety, and power of film. In freshman year of college I took a course about the relationship between visual arts and written arts and learned that each medium is suited for different expressive purposes, so I was primed to the concept of "X art medium is probably better fit to express Y idea." In fact, after taking that course, my story ideas began morphing into new dimensions. Sometimes I would come up with a concept and realize that it was probably better suited as a sculpture than as a poem, or think of yet another idea and wish I could realize it into a movie rather than a short story. Learning more about cinematography, screenwriting, and other aspects of film made me understand even more what film could really do to both well-read and casual audiences.
Since then I've been captivated by the art of film. It combines so fantastically the poignancy and power of photography, the descriptiveness of writing, the subtlety of music, and so many other disciplines. Isolating just one aspect of a movie already yields so much material to learn and analyze. While writing is able to endure time and use language to encourage readers to draw an idea in their head, film lets its watchers experience another life at a set pace with set visuals. It feels much more real and allows for much more subtlety that otherwise has to be buried very deeply in literature. This is not to say that one form is better than the other; just that they are vastly different in their strengths yet both so uniquely powerful.
I just wanted to express this newfound love on this blog and encourage people to look into the aforementioned YouTube channels. They're wonderfully educational and have opened my eyes to the great world of film! If you are interested in seeing me gush even more about movies, I have created a secondary blog here on film reviews and analyses.
Thanks again and happy reading/writing!
i.
it hurts to hunger,
to think that there lies
more beyond the dirt.
that tired arms can row
large boats into new worlds.
ii.
i told my friend (in tears):
it hurts to dream
and it does, it hurts to
feel the darkness of the world
as i feel my way to the end,
my fingers tracing the folds in the fabric,
not knowing what lies at the hem.
iii.
yet there is no euphoria like wondering
colors which might not exist,
vibrant and enlightening.
iv.
possibility is a mathematical concept,
the idea that what could and couldn’t,
is and isn’t all live in the same, jagged universe.
you and i -- we dive into it.
she stayed for a month before my mother found something online,
but it’s hard to forget even ten years down the line the difference between
its uniform, robotic sweeps and her brush-like swipes on the floor,
little sunsets she painted with her mop.
I had this dream in which there were fruit flies (drosophila melanogaster -- my freshman year biology teacher was so excited when she talked about them that I henceforth remembered the scientific name through all these years) embedded into the skin under my palms, dotted like living chia seeds sprinkled onto my hands, winged blackheads that squirmed and I felt them all, felt each of them wiggling around under my bumpy palms. I had to squeeze each of them out like an overripe pimple and felt the bugs leave my skin with stinging puss. I remember waking up that morning and checking my hands frantically to see if it had transferred into reality.
I don’t know why, but that feeling -- the feeling of uncomfortable squirming under my flesh in such an inevitable, un-ignorable way haunts me constantly. When I feel stressed, my palms tingle slightly as if I can recall the feeling that I haven’t technically felt before -- echoes of the flies’ movement that I felt the morning after the dream. It feels so real, so threatening, so violating. I can bring it up into my head upon command, the erratic buzzing and the pain as I squeeze them out, the way my hands become home to bugs and then craters of stinging, exposed skin after I’ve removed them all, many of them dead because I disembodied them in my strenuous attempt to rid myself of the parasites. Afterwards, my hands look like a sponge with small holes, as if someone took a metal suction straw and sucked out little bits of my palm, dot by dot so that when I make a fist, I can feel my skin fold around the holes, feel the sting of the fresh, sensitive skin five layers deep that met the world’s air months too early.