The Night After Steve's Funeral

The night sky was an inkwell and someone spilled glitter into it. The glassy lake, an obsidian slab, was untouched by breeze. An occasional shooting star raced across the sky, its celestial path mirrored on the lake's surface. And there I was, just floating in the center of a lake that seemed as if it could have been the edge of the world: no shoreline to be seen. I'd lost sight of it just after dusk; that time when everything appears to be coated in dust, as if a building had been imploded nearby.

I was the nucleus; the full moon slowly rotated around me. The guttural croaks of the freshwater drum gradually subsided as the night grew long. I had no sense of time, lost in an environment captured as a Polaroid snapshot, a scene that would fade and turn to a blurry, sepia-toned memory as time passed.

The distorted voices of campers, once carried over the water, faded and ceased altogether, my sign that I was truly alone, secluded and sheltered from the world. Then - finally THEN - I fell into, at last, my element. I disappeared into the comfort and familiarity of nature, wholly enveloped in the only form of peace I know: the solitary method for me to achieve a quiet mind.

In this rarely-visited alternate universe, I was able to forget the disturbing form of grief I had endured that day. I disconnected my feelings of confusion and, for the first time in a long time, felt absolutely nothing. Relaxation (or was it mental exhaustion?) took over and I began to fall asleep, floating flat on my back in the onyx water.

It expended a great amount of willpower to pull myself out of the trance. Soon, someone would be looking for me. Soon, I was going to have to get back to the dock. Going back meant driving back home in a few hours and returning to the life I'd grown to hate: city life. As I begrudgingly swam back, I kept looking to the east, silently cursing the sky's ever-growing light blue hue.



(i know someone said they were waiting on my narcissistic entries about my sordid sex life. i haven't forgotten, but i lost inspiration for awhile. being busy is kind of a crappy excuse, but i will do my best to sit down and write them. they're just going to be small memories; not the whole horrible affair, so maybe it won't be too painful to read.)