Chapter 2: Ferris Wheel Speech
Most days I woke up to the sound of adolescence. Those ticking time-bombs of words seeping into my silence, erupting into a fit of messy beats that sounded more like quail wings wagging through moistened air or the clicky speech of tribal people with soot-stained skin. The language was almost unintelligible, something spidery and water-logged that you listened to from the top of a Ferris wheel. I must assume that all those lengthy, conversations that pedaled between my roommates are inscribed in my psyche. All those words spoken before I was awake must be wedged between the smell of bread and the lyrics to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
I was notorious for my late awakenings; my slow, putty sleep that never really came. I was classified as an insomniac in the way that everyone is: hallmarked by one bizarre word that seemed to encompass the general view of an affliction. Werewolf, wizard, playboy, masochist, liar, dreamer, insomniac. All those words wadded together, stamped by the virtual "everybody" that seems to loom in youth. All those words surging around me, churning with their uneven edges and protruding designs; all the things those words didn't capture. They were patterns that lofty souls could follow if they were not fortunate enough to care. Most times when I was asked why I didn't sleep I said "I am too busy thinking." It's an answer that is honest enough. I have too many billows of possibility to consider, too many thoughts to think and worries to worry.
It woke up one morning and I happened upon a vision, a replayable scene that sagged in my consciousness. It was in the midst of early and afternoon, the calm of the in-between-hours that everyone seems to misplace as the days go on. I still felt soggy from my lack of sleep, frosty as underexposed film. I staggered down steps and my limbs knew inherently, that were encrypted in my modes of too-tired or too-busy.
I found her standing below the steps with her hip slouched and her full height bent. Her hair was down with delicate curlicues at the end. Her skin was nearly transparent, so soft and pale that it looked like cashmere. The bridge of her nose and her forehead were greasy. A purple-brown halo was forming around her lifeless eyes, sliced like the rings of antique trees. She looked both frustrated and indifferent, a venerable feat. I wasn't sure if she was speaking to the boy standing next to her or watching for the loop of Venus in the window.
The two of them lingered like shadows along the frame of the door. The boy was tall with stringy limbs and arms that looked like vintage canes. He stood above her but the rust-colored hair along her back and web of veins littering her eyes made her look fierce and almost entranced. The hazard of those shifty parties she appeared at, blinking like a dot.
I watched them through the hollow of steps, a mirage of colored crystals, staring through a kaleidoscope haze. She thrummed her fingers against the solid bone in her hip; I tried to memorize the beat. Soft soft loud, hard soft, soft loud. I struggled to translate that beat into my silence, my unkempt daydreams. The sight of her, that grainy illusion of her heart-shaped lips and the hair lolling along her neckline made me woozy, almost queasy with fullness.
They both looked miserable; unshaped and too quiet. I thought of how different it would be when we were together. We would stand in that same doorway but I would push her up against the curled wood, outline her lips in mine and tell her that she was beautiful. I could picture us lying in bed together, watching the sun sink into far off glaciers, our teenage hearts vibrating.
I scaled the steps falling heavier and heavier against each platform. The wood was spongy and worn, a trailway of flesh. I passed them, staring at my shoelaces and the mousy stone beneath them.
She spoke to him in whispers, low and confidential. "I just, I just can't do this anymore." It was a line plucked right out of a movie script. I knew that I was in the midst of another break-up and I knew that this referred to their relationship but something about the way she said it indicated more. Lily said that word like the nameless, stringy he knew precisely what she meant. The tone, high-pitched and weedy, signified the hundreds of thousands of reasons behind it, junkyards full of reasons.
I walked through the common room, down the lacquered marble steps and out into the air. I didn't hesitate along the path of grass, just hiked for yards along the green flooring following an unnamed map. I entered the Forbidden Forest into a thicket of wooden pillars and dead leaves. I sat on a log overlooking the only pond held within those phantom walls. I had spent much of first year searching the grounds for solitude, looking through abandoned staircases and unopened rooms for somewhere that was isolated. Once I stepped foot into this monotone sphere I'm not sure I ever really left.
I didn't name it corny things like "My happy place!" or "Potter's Hideaway!" I let it be what it was, let it stay clandestine. I went there when my mind was uneasy and sat for hours watching my own reflection smudge with the wind.
With stubs of wood I carved images of Lily's eyes in the silt tracing the circuit of veins connecting at every point. For days after that all I did in class was draw those glassy, vein-riddled eyes. I drew pages filled with them, staring back at me reddened and sovereign. I outlined them over and over again until the blackness bled through the paper and it still wasn't deep enough, it never would be. I traced their outsides until my fingers ached and stared at the waves of eyeballs looking at me though inky lashes. Every sheet of notes was speckled with those eyes. They were up in the corner or along the margin; on the front, back, top, left. They were squiggled in-between words and doodled inside textbooks. Her eyes haunted me. They appeared along the rim of my dreams, splattered like red saucers. They were inflated and shrunk, dipped in color and blanked into nothingness, into red fields of eyes that I couldn't escape.
I had been present during one of her many break-ups. It felt surreal for the most part. I saw Stringy He on occasion. At dinner with a wilted face picking at his food, looking around, sighing uncountable, innumerable sighs. Walking to his next class, clutching books with whitened knuckles, snaking through the crowd.
I couldn't help but feel sorry for him because that was her effect. That's what she did to all of them. To all of us. She was addictive. You just couldn't forget the insides of her arms and that slow smile. Images of her ran deep in your psyche. There was her painted toes and floppy hair and even more intimately, her naked breast, her puckered lips. She was instilled in your character. Lily Evans had a way permeating the soul.
It was unfortunate, all that power that she held unwittingly. We were all fixated on her. We were drawn in by her beauty then mesmerized by her obscurity. She fit the form of murky shadows and answered back when we called her in our thoughts. She followed us through our dreams as we tried to find her outside them.
There were so many of us; gathering in hoards and reminiscing about her shaggy clothes (adorned most days in lace, ty-dye, fringes). She had a charisma that made every thing about her feel intimate, unshared. We lined up as suitors ready to polish her with praise, pepper her with love. We all clamored at her touch and shrunk away from that blatant, unblinking stare of hers.
But it was all words anyway, wasn't it? All these sundry sounds that went on for lightyears, which never stopped. There was the single-word labels and Lily's movie-made letdown. There was the sun-moistened flow of conversation and the words that subsisted in the womb of my imagination; the millions of words that were never said, never heard. I couldn't begin to fathom their number. There was a foreboding vastness to those syllable-split phrases that we all depended on, or didn't, lived by or forgot.
Along with all those words and all their meanings came the things that they implied. It was the subject matter they were bound to and the stereotypes they reinforced. Words were showing up everywhere now just as I had lost all of mine. They filled journals, newspapers and books, notes, letters, songs, voices. They spawned creation and mangled flesh. Words were bullets you never died from. They lingered with you till the day you died and even past then. Once they were said they were never retracted, only haply misplaced from time to time.
It was hard to think about all my conversations, all that speech bleeding from the seams. I sat on that rotting log thinking about words and looking down at the hieroglyphics of teenage woe: the deep, sand-crusted diary of an girl through the eyes of her unrequited lover. The more I reflected on the verbal side of life the less was excluded. The cosmic quality sent me reeling. All this thought of words was noxious because I knew so many of them, spoke so many words throughout my lifetime but I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out the right ones to make her love me.
-->