Distance

By: J.R. Harrington.

Time marches on, and on, and on. You change the clock on your computer, manually marking the distance. The mountains are gone from your field of vision, replaced instead with hills, valleys filled with fog and sprinkling raindrops. Piano plays in the library where you sit writing, carefully nudging you towards something.

Swirling notes in the air, freshly scented chamomile. Lavender that makes you sneeze and a touch of hunger, unbidden, the lusting after creation. The crescent moon feeling of completion when you fill the pages with words, marking each paragraph in the perfect shape. Expecting evenness, smiling when it’s achieved.

Birdsong through the window, notes you recognize but cannot place. A trill, poignant and perfect, dragging your mind to the outside, the green grasses slick with rain, the trees off in the distance, the fog sweetly clouding your vision, marking the impossibility of the day with lowered render distance.

Tenderhearted and soft footed, avoiding the places where the floorboards creak with careful steps, calling out for softened things like buttered sunshine, fanciful lounges with carved wood legs. Notes passed between tables, signing for a cigarette, trading tears in for a new version of yourself, one with new wisdoms hiding behind yellowed teeth.

Sunday routines of writing poetry, preparing yourself for the week in the only way you know. A long drawn out yawn, then a sigh, fresh air waiting for you to start up again. Stomach aches that last forever, ear aches from descending planes, landing in places with poor reception to meet with your grandmother.

Connections between the hanging notes and ceiling fan draw strings, pushing the air around lazily, changing the shape of the distance. Making friends with the music, it curls around your throat and warns that it could kill you, if you aren’t kind to it. An unkind assumption that you wouldn’t love it with gentle ferocity, as you love all things.

The difference between you and the music is beauty. There are marks on your skin taking away from your looks, wounds from where you’ve picked at acne, torn your skin open to tear it away. Scars invisible upon your face, scars invisible in many other places. Waiting until you can see your friends again, wondering what sort of mischief you’ll get up to together.

Ceramic birds on shelves high overhead, watching you in utter silence. They do not chirp, but they have souls. It lives in their little eyes, but they sit resting, unable to move. You sit with them, mirroring their silence not unkindly. There is a photograph fallen downward, unreachable to fix.

You wish you could write words that feel the way the music sounds, the way deft hands press into a different kind of key. One making music and the other marking down words. Typos made and missed notes, just a tad off-key. Windchimes broken and waiting to be fixed, is there a meaning behind this? The way the wind shattered them instead of gently brushing against, the

rage of it!

Tumbling like a brook to the ground, softly resting in the muddied grass. Steel rounded things, charming when strung together, nothing apart. Isn’t that a metaphor for your heart? Rhetorical questions, sung out with gravel in your throat. Sarcastic remnants of blood on your lips, fingertips brushing trails of it across your face.

A ghost in the halls of the hospital, wandering aimlessly. A sort of missing misery, indifferent to everything surrounding you, indifferent to the way they draw your blood in the early

morning and take it away. Still you run at windows trying to escape, like a fly trapped inside. Eager to get out but indifferent to your captivity, new activity.

Strings augmenting the piano, the swelling well of creek beds pushing against the shore. Rainfall coming and tearing up the terrain, helpless to remain. Bearing heavy books on your back, bag full of them, making sure you never run out of things to read. Latenight, afternoon flight. Stopping for a ten PM dinner, stopping and starting again in the fog.

Waiting and watching as the wind shifts, waiting and watching for it all to turn away, get blown out somewhere far off. Plaintive cries from tiny molecules, ushered back home to the sky, run away and learn to fly. Candle-lit rooms, dusty halls with chandeliers hanging high above, waiting to be turned on with a flame.

You’re somewhere else now, somewhere you always thought was better—but you’re stressed to the bone, you just want to go lay down in the dirt, in the grave. Busy living, unable to give it up, like a bad habit, you’re losing track of how many days you’ve lived, now. There’s graffiti on the silk shawl you’ve weaved from threads of liveliness, bountiful in the atmosphere you curate.

Dressed to the nines and ready for something greater, some starker detail against the corkboard walls surrounding you. The piano swirls and you twirl with it, skirts in hand, a slash of color against the dying dullness faintly creeping into being. Your brightness wins against it, sharp and pronounced in the afternoon sunshine.

The day grows ever longer, and you grow with it, finding it wanting of your charms. You with your amethyst hung to find wisdom in your dreams, you with the graduation tassel as a good luck charm. You inspire yourself, creating something with the unspooling of ravenous desire, a flame growing to fire.

In the mirror you confront hardened edges and soften them with a gentle look, a caress down the small of your back. The song repeats, nothing skipping through the cracks of sidewalk paths. The roots break free from the ground and warp panes of concrete, the branches push through stained glass exteriors.

You are more than your worst thoughts, more than the body that houses you. You are the tree that grows to reach the sun, turning leaves in the wind. You are like that wind, invisible and intangible, a conduit for something more. You pour words from the crystal decanter of your mouth, carefully placed like steps of a cautious dancer.

There is meaning in this, all of it, though to you it reads as nothing more than maladaptive daydreaming, perusing the cloud-soft edges of twisted grapevines. There are books in libraries with less meaning than this, the palpable juxtaposition of thought and word. There is no way to reconcile them but this.

Your wordless world, spun together with strands of spider’s silk. The heartless turn of phrases, mangling them with intention. Cigarettes in the mist, fine soft-focus filter in the distance. And it’s all about distance, isn’t it? The change between where you were and where you are, the long trip and calm ending, seated in the library putting the puzzle together.

Gentle rising and falling, dizziness upon standing. Prescribed overdose, varicose veins. Hating the way that melody ends with a crash, volatile. A certain escapist opportunity, run away with your heart light in hand. Heavy bags carried in and left in the bedroom, waiting to be opened and investigated like you forgot what you packed.

Missing your CD player, left in the mountains with numerous other important things. Thinking “At least,” about everything, at least you have your notebooks, at least you didn’t bring every art supply with you, at least you get to see your friends again after what feels like forever. At least the plane didn’t crash land in a lake.

Slightly cold when you light up the cigarette in the mist, standing there staring off at the distance. In your dreams writing letters, in your dreams feeling better than you ever have in real life. Is a dream just a forecast of what comes after? Wondering about it won’t save you, won’t make you immortal.

Each pause in your breath is a separation of moments, each moment is a separation of minutes. Your phone in your hand, checking notifications during the ad breaks. Nothing new, nothing new, always wishing for something new. Distracting yourself with reading poetry, all you have is poetry, you consider writing it down and slotting it into your poetry book.

At least you have your poetry book, at least you have spare notebooks. Waiting to be opened, waiting to be filled with all the work you do in the classes you have yet to start. Not willing to abandon half-finished notebooks the way you do your writing projects, they’ll have to wait a while.

Every writer has a million notebooks, just as every artist has far too many art supplies. All your brushes are left in the mountains, excepting very few kept in watercolor sets. Finally, there is a symphony drawing close, pushing into your consciousness. Words you can never remember to spell, thank goodness for autocorrect.

But in that symphony rests sour memories, writing love letters in the night to someone who will never write you back, crafting origami flowers and struggling to shape it properly. Fifty red paper cranes, painstaking pain in your back. Just waiting on justice, just waiting for it to ever be fair. Longing for a world where all you have to do is write.

The mountains are left far behind, but you think of their beauty as you write, the vastness of their peaks, the ruddy browns and starker greens. The rocks you feared would tumble and crush you down beneath. There is nothing strange in finding beauty in the world, even when you rather hate the place.

Cracking knuckles, cracking knees. Drawing yourself from memory, appearance warped with the difference between mind and mirror. Hearing feeling in the notes played out, tumbling, gasping, drawing breath in the space you’ve made for them. Argumentative, soprano fighting alto, struggling against each other valiantly.

You would choose trees over mountains any day, the endless forest swaddling you in its embrace. Turning from an inhospitable place to home, in some ways. The path you walk from memory, knowing exactly where it leads, not minding the slickness of rain-soaked terrain, you won’t ever fall from grace.

Near misses, closing in on your goal and moving too swiftly, snatching hands missing by mere inches. Catching butterflies in nets, placing them carefully in terrariums—what’s left? The buzzing bee lands tenderly on the flower, ruled by strings you cannot see. The world, a vast puppet show, continues on without remark.

Growing into new shoes, old things with worn down soles left abandoned. A light on in an empty house, forgotten. Glass ball lights, swallowing the electricity and opening glowing mouths. That mystery of why it never changes, that mystery of how it all rearranges. Cracking knuckles and continuing to write, unnerving focus, single minded.

Devotion to it, focus unabated. But wait, let me check my phone real quick, maybe back-react to everything on that one app. An hour later the piece lies waiting, and you don’t want to finish it now. Everything erased again, everything discarded to the revisions tab, which you check for better starts.

Once you decide you’re going to finish it this time, you don’t get a choice in what comes out. You just get to keep on writing, never erasing any throwaway line. You are a force to be reckoned with, but wouldn’t it be better if the force you applied was more careful, less demanding?

But the music still plays, those notes that feel like spinning, climbing, falling. There’s nothing more renewing than classical music at the right time, in the perfect light. Nothing more rewarding than finally finishing something after weeks of failing to do so. Nothing so rejuvenating as a return to your childhood home.

And finally, with the distance, you are home.