Enchantment.

You enchant me. I enchant you. I am the daughter you want to look after and guide. You are the neighbor I wish had always been by my side. I am the lover you have looked forward to for so long. You are the intrigue I’ve been waiting for. I am the wild foreigner. You are the secretive wallflower. I am the object. You are the subject. I am the friend, the interest, the desire, the face or the word or the soft touch of the hand that lingers long after I am gone. You are the wind that whispers your name in my ear all day long. We are enchanted.

Why do we click so easily? What makes me, the meek and soulful, bewitched by you, and what makes you, the blond and beautiful, keep coming back to me? How long will this last, and is part of the game the uncertainty and the waiting, the distance and the fear?

Enchantment, despite the connotations of witchcraft and spellery, is a temporary thing subject to the ebb and flow of a life (a mind!) that flows continuously.

It is the feeling that everything important to say is to be said to you. It is the desire of the chest to feel full with your thought. It is the knowledge that you are not, all things considered, what I objectively want, but the game of hunting you down all the same. We are enchanted and reason, like witchcraft and spellery, can quickly blow away, because reason stands not a chance against the feeling of your head on my breast.

We walk and walk, wanderlost and asleep, guided by a familiar hand on the small of our back, playing hot and cold with the butterflies in our stomachs. Despite our objections, our legs will not stop. Do you know how to make a love stand still?

Overwhelmed.

Exposition.

85 words.

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When it comes together or falls apart we call it fate–not because it was meant to be, or because we wish to exempt ourselves from responsibility, or because the desire for some higher being and meaning remain strong in our hearts, no. We call it fate because we find our lives, coming together and falling apart with the ebb and flow of the emblematic river, so beautiful that word “coincidence” surely abuses it. Fate is the declaration of beauty in the face of randomicity.

To rest is to heal the aberrations we cannot control.

exposition

384 words

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I don’t like it when people talk slowly. I become frustrated with their inability to articulate their own thoughts, so I try to help– I jump in and attempt to finish their sentences for them, find that word they’ve been erring over, extrapolate the idea they cannot quite grasp. I can be right, but mostly I am wrong. I am not them, and even if I did know what they were trying to communicate, it is unlikely I will say it in the way they are searching for. Still, I wish they would get on with it.

I see it as an inability to find words and ideas. It is a lacking. More than that I find myself two steps beyond what the speaker is saying. I jump in because I want to help them along– it is an arrogance of mine in which my mind cannot stay as steady and concentrated as one who weighs each word carefully.

This is mostly beside the point. I am frustrated by the slow talker, for better or for worse.

Yet there is something special about pauses and the slowing of a sentence. Breaking up a sentence in unique ways can change its meaning. It is the speaker’s use of punctuation– except we, as an audience, must obey it, unlike in the written word where a reader can largely ignore the carefully placed comma. Sometimes it is a speaker’s inability to use their punctuation well or engagingly, but other times it is my own inability to trust the speaker with their words.

Forcing someone to          take the pauses we place in our          sentences can radically change our experience of the words. Often in repeating one sentence over and over again in our minds (as I do when meditating) natural, long pauses work their way in and add a character to the sentence that mere punctuation cannot.

To rest          is to heal          the aberrations         we cannot control.

Splitting up this sentence enunciates the different ideas it deals with: rest, healing, aberrations and control. It is in some ways similar to parsing a sentence, though clearly in a less formal manner.

This is not to suggest you talk in such a manner, but that even in the things I dislike I can find inspiration, subverting my dislike for pleasure.