Across the street, which is dusky and black, the neighbors have turned on a few Christmas lights; the multi-colored glow of plastic trees looks cheerful and warm, and dimly illuminates the cold evening air with an unusual radiance. As your gaze wanders idly up into the sky, the tree line serenades you with a few straggling fingertips, waving in a chilling breeze, dipping gently back and forth. Beyond them, the sun has finally slipped beneath it's blanketed horizon, and washed the sky with a color so beautiful it makes my eyes tear up. The delicate, precise pinks and oranges resemble a flaming temple, dying slowly into a glowing bed of embers that warm the edge of the world until it's crispy and toasted, blushing as it tells the world goodnight. Finally, the periwinkle sheets come up, oh so softly up and over, until the faint afterglow is merely a wisp beneath the skyline. The modest azure deepens as the comforter is laid out, deep blue and dazzling, and you tilt your head back a little farther and see the first good winter star, winking at you far, far beneath. You imagine the coldness stinging your nose and filling your lungs with sharp, sweet air, underlined with crushed pine straw and rotting leaves, peppermint and someone grilling ribs. The wind whips your hair and brings redness to your cheeks, and you laugh like you've never laughed before because the world is just so wonderful that you have to be a part of it; you must be a part of the wonder because you are so filled with it. Unadulterated joy cascades, unbidden, all around you and sweeps you up into the black, black sky, pinpricked with so many constellations that you imagine God stringing His Christmas lights out just for you to see, sparkling and celebratory...
And then mom says "Close the blinds, Kristina! The sun is gone."
3 comments:
bahaha. you write amazingly! :)
i love you for posting brooke waggoner.
i now enjoy your writing with infinite love, if i am capable of such love. i don't know why it's taken me so long to love your writing with reckless abandon. probably jealously. but i figure, we compliment each other because of our differences (you know what i'm saying. we're as different as black and white, that's not a new topic in our conversation). and i can say with gladness now that you are a better writer than me, and you don't have to deny that.
i absolutely am glad to call you friend. i love the last line of this post, only because i know she didn't kill your joy with it.
You're going somewhere good with your life. You take me to another level of setting goals. You're good fellowship. When we hang out there's a little cartoon bubble over your head of chapel hill and one over my head of the wolfpack. In your presence, which is so different from my own yet ambitious and overall good, i prosper.
you are a happy part of my life. i'd say shame on me for holding out on allowing that, but i don't like to live under shame. and i'm overly cautious, that's a reason i held off.
i enjoy your conversation and friendship. and you are, probably crazy. but you challenge me to be a better person, without me ever acknowledging that to you. my temper will flare from time to time, and maybe on my bad days i won't like your poetry, but you're an Ok person with me. i trust you ever increasingly since Orr's class last year and the events that surrounded us. and while i hate to even say that time happened, i think i'm able to see now that you are true-blue.
You are my friend. You yankee. :)
ps this is the original copy and i didn't change my rhetoric or erase anything. it's the blunt emotion we talked about. i hope it all translates into something nice, something of friendship. if not, i say stick it to the man and not me. Viva la girls who don't get nominated for senior superlatives and have high enough standards to carry themselves with dignity throughout highschool!
very nice. sounds like a short story...
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