Ode to the Young Romantic

By, J.R. Harrington.

1. Prologue 

Set the scene, your bedroom realm: A vase of dried flowers slumps in the windowsill, fallen petals lie solemnly beneath a blanket of dust. The light is sparse, barest slivers of night-time radiance falling on each article in turn. 

A seldom-used desk displays an array of carefully labeled jars; “potpourri”, “insect wings,” and “chamomile tea” among their ranks. Sat atop them, the skull of an unloved hen, the sun-cracked vertebrae of an elk, a jewel-beetle encased in resin. Walls covered in various art pieces; wistful collage posters, rage-filled paintings, photographs taken by a teenage smoker before she grew up. 

On the bookshelf a myriad of lonely belongings; given a home beside fairy tales, Arthurian legends, poetry with personal anecdotes inked in the leftover space of sprawling pages. A tenderly restored porcelain doll, haunted music players dusted gently every week. All things carefully arrayed in a

desperate attempt to portray the beauty of your soul. 

A closet full of various styles to aid in your endeavors—playing dress-up with silk, tweed, and velvet. Gowns, men’s shirts, nylon tights and brocade ties. Gloves to keep your fingers from touching when you’re overwhelmed by the world. 

In the center of the room, still like a set piece, is a giant mattress furnished with a time-worn bed set—hand-me-down throws, crochet blanket, furred pillows and stuffed animals in quaint attire. Beneath the faded red, gold, and sage quilted-comforter, with tassels brushing at your earlobe, our narrator lies asleep. 

2. Persona 

Build a persona, fiction to pilot: Grandeur, falsity, perfect lies to place upon burdened shoulders. The type of person any pseudo-intellectual teenager longs to become. Distant, different. Often alone but never lonely, too busy searching. 

For what are you searching? 

Insight. Into myself, into others. Into the way the world works. I want to learn Astronomy, and I want to understand my condition—what makes me human? Is it this strange curiosity? How will you find it? 

Well, reading, of course. Isn’t that where knowledge comes from? A jaunt to the old library. Taking notes in a cafe. Writing out poetry to classical to sort out my thoughts. What else is there to do? 

What other lovely things will you do? 

Oh, I don’t know… Calligraphy? A museum trip? Perhaps I’ll learn to create something of my own. That would help me figure out what this all means, I think. What about— You become erudite, personable. Paradoxical; that strange satisfaction of dwelling in the melancholy. Solitary studies, gallons of coffee, retromania in action. Omne Quod Movetur Ab Alio Movetur—All that moves is moved by another. 

Am I just a puppet? Is this real at all? Am I truly human, or just a piece of the play? Per Sonare—the mask through which your voice sounds. 

Making myself more seemly. Socially desirable, a representative to work through your poetic problems—I am nothing, if not fictitious. I am self-indulgent fantasy, building blocks to place a story upon. Old and new, similar and overlapping, flexible and fluid.

3. The Teenage Smoker 

Tell your tale, what do you see? Falling back in time, I stumble on a girl with a lit cigarette and a camera hanging from her neck. Hiding at the edge of the schoolyard with her friends; she speaks of wild ways she’d like to live—a farm, like the one she grew up on, a house built in the woods, a red porch overlooking grasslands with high mountains in the distance. Passion almost off-putting, doing stupid things when her parents aren’t looking. 

She hands her camera to a friend to weave a daisy-chain as she spins a tale. She walks to the cemetery alone, until a boy with too many problems and a beat-up car offers a lift. I follow, watching her speak to him. Watching the way he becomes entranced as she takes a picture of the tallest monument. He laughs, she smiles, he jokes, she grins. 

A beautiful scene of young love in the works. And yet all I want is to leave… 

4. The Pianist 

So you do, appearing somewhere new. Now you’re in a concert-hall, sitting high in the box seats of a lavish balcony. Look down at the stage. 

Centerstage—grand piano, lid raised high and crisp. Shielding strings from my searching gaze. The pianist, small in the distance, perched on the stool like some fragile bird in a cage. Carefully, he aligns the thin sheet music and nods, just once. The lights over the audience dim to nothing, the spotlight cuts through the black leaving only one place to focus. 

And he begins to play. I can nearly hear his pain in that melancholy refrain. Curling in against ebony and ivory keys, like the beginning of a sob—he sees himself in the strings within, hammers thudding across guts stretched thin. 

The man becomes the instrument, and the instrument becomes the man. Passion blurs the line between art and artist, muddling their colors as fresh paint on the palette. The notes reverberate, building speed, slowing, rising, falling, piercing me. 

Sound-waves stretch out in the air, shot upwards from beneath the lid like an upside-down sled. Pianissimo, piano, mezzo-piano, mezzo-forte, forte, FORTISSIMO! I make myself at home in the cloying crescendo, only to fall into sudden stillness. 

Tears are leaking from my eyes, and the lights turn to blind me, and the pianist slumps, falling against the keys with a catastrophe of sound. The curtains close abruptly, and it’s over. 

5. The Insect 

You find yourself in soft peat and moss. A pillbug scuttles past, bright sun gleaming on it’s shell. I pick myself up and trail after it, curious to see what it does. The unusually large creature stops to nibble an unusually large plant in the shade. 

I sit down and wait, it takes a day and an age. Watching the world I see a yellow butterfly, shockingly bright against dark verdant leaves. Floating in the mist like a paper kite. Up above the sky begins to darken, night falling slow in the small, unseen world. As the moonlight starts to glimmer through the leaves, the insects wake. 

I watch strange exoskeletons emerge from under rocks and logs. Beautiful iridescent things wake and fly, glowworms drift lazily through the low sky. The air feels cold and wet, noises amplified in the silence of the dark.

A snail begins to glide by. I stand and walk beside it, a journey that takes an era—climbing up the wall of a house beside it, resting on a windowsill while it nibbles ivy. I look through the glass into a bright room. 

An entomologist leans over a desk, delicately shifting the wings of a patterned brown moth. I watch, wincing, as they drive a pin into their specimen—what could have been a friend. Shadow-boxes arrayed on the walls are full of familiar faces. A familiar butterfly trapped behind a pane of glass, surrounded on all sides by lustrous wood. 

The window is open, just a crack, so I squeeze inside. On the table where I land I find old jam jars containing dusty little moths, and scrappy little flies—tiny aphids, ladybirds, disembodied damselfly wings. Bottles of glue, and a cushion full of slim pins. 

I take a pin in hand, and sneak along the edges of the wall. The bug-killer mutters to itself, but I no longer understand the human words. I become a wasp—stinging for seemingly no reason—rage so small it cannot be seen. 

They find me days later, still as an abandoned home—and I am picked up with care, aligned with shaking tools, and pinned through my thorax. The stung bug-lover mutters words I only now hear; “I’m sorry.” 

6. The Dreamer 

You are dreaming. But I don’t really mind. Does that make it any less real? If it’s happening inside? If the feelings linger, is that enough to make it alive? 

Do you really even dream? 

I dream of having a piano of my own to play, in an orange-lit study with stuffed shelves everywhere but the lace-curtained window in front of the desk. Of CD’s spinning and emanating gentle noise to help with focus. I dream of first-edition books, wrapped in old cloth with gilded woodcut designs. I dream of writing; stories that never come out just as beautiful when written in real life. I dream of adventures in deep pathless woods, searching for unknown creatures with a notebook and pen as my only defense. 

What do you really dream of? 

I dream of falling. Waking with a jolt and a vague sense of pain. I dream of infinite me’s whose lives I destroy the moment I brush against their realities. I dream of traveling to distant planets and holding someone I love as we run out of oxygen, or as the Earth—our home—shatters in the wake of the sun. 

I dream of strange dark skies that pull apart reality. The end of times feels real, contained in my mind. I dream of men who stretch rows of plastic play-houses into suburban McMansions, and of girls who apologize endlessly for not hurting me. I dream of house cats tearing up my skin, and tigers rubbing against me affectionately. I dream that I’m at the deep bottom of a lake, the pressure of water cradling me. 

I dream that the lake becomes thick oil; iridescent black the last thing I see as it floods into me—I was the oil-slick, but I wake as you. 

7. Anima 

You gasp, waking. The couch-cushions beneath you are damp with sweat. The persona is dead, and you are what killed it. Another version of yourself, another freak-accident for a new reality. The feeling is familiar, strange grief for a fiction.

What is left of you, with the persona shattered? You search for the meaning, some sensibility within the ludicrous drifting memories of your subconscious mind. You are the pianist, the insect, the dreamer. You are the specter watching your mother fall in love with your father, you are the pregnancy that broke them apart. You are precisely-struck strings, the Atlas Moth with flimsy wings arranged just so—you are the pin through the thorax, gripping majesty by the throat. 

You are the simple life of small creatures in a world no man could fathom the joys of. You are the passion blurring lines, the dark sky breaking borders. You are afraid. Of yourself and of others. Your own strangeness horrifies you, hidden beneath your ribs to avoid anyone else’s discomfort. 

You are the romantic, donning a mask and stepping on stage. You are a foolish thing, dooming yourself in a million ways. You are Icarus, rising against your best interest—nose-diving down—too young to know better, too weak to fight your impulse. As always, the young bird falls. As always, the heat melts away your wings. Isn’t that the point of this all? You crash into the sea, but that’s never the end—you must get up and try again. 

Noli foras ire, in teipsum redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas— Do not go outside yourself, return to yourself: truth dwells in the interior of man.