quitvision Pieces, Writing

Unchanged Views

I’m not new here. I was once, but not anymore. Five or six years ago this place scared the hell out of me, made me question every decision I had made to get up to the point that brought me here. A day not unlike today. Bright with sun, quiet and small in a large world. The same familiarity, swinging through that same well-understood corner of the map. A place for you. But on some warm days, the calm, consistent, everyday breeze motions you out a little past your comfortable depth, catching a window of the world just beyond your boundaries.

That day I didn’t stand away and watch from far off, tilt my head and follow the action with my eyes. That day I couldn’t observe from behind distance or glass; I fell through the window. I woke up in my single bed in my old bedroom, ate breakfast and watched TV, looked out at a series of unchanged views like framed paintings. The same scenes from the closer end of childhood remain almost exact, while over the years their meaning to me slowly and imperceptibly warps alongside my own panning perspective. I am taller now than when we moved here, I am no longer ten years old. When I was ten years old I never considered what it would be like on the day I moved out from my parent’s house. I may have been more prepared for it at that age, of course not practically, but in my brain, still wide open. I was just as qualified then to wake up in my single bed, eat breakfast, watch TV and look out the windows. Many times I’d climbed into the back-left seat of my parent’s car and watched the world whoosh by. My dad, in driving us anywhere we needed to be, exercising a trusted skill that I couldn’t really comprehend the complexity of. Even at nineteen, still paying as much attention as when I was five to a constant you just stop noticing.

On my fifth birthday, I received a lego rocket ship set with light-up thrusters. I was used to people watching me play with the gifts they had brought me on the four other birthdays I’d had by that point. As I pushed together the bricks in a morning-lit end of a room my memory struggles to define, no one had a chance to watch me for long. I was so excited that I truly didn’t care. At some point one of my parents came in needing me to stop and pack up the set, or for me to go outside while they packed away the pieces. I must choose a single item to take with us from our collection of garden toys. I don’t remember what I chose, but I do remember wondering why we couldn’t take them all because I liked them all. I still used them all. A sense of loss for molded plastic and good play. That was the strongest emotion I felt towards moving away from the house I was born in. At that age, a place is just a place.

quitvision Pieces, Writing

Made Of Wet

Wet days in summer. The rain shimmering as it beats on the warehouse roof and fills the quietly overgrowing ditch behind the building. Puddles splurge, swallowing up the parts of the road you ride your bike on. The smell of fresh saturation radiates in through the entrances, across the crisp borders of shelter drawn on the concrete in two tones. The sky reaches all the way low to the surface and engulfs it. Continue packing boxes while swimming in a cloud. Outside the widest vastest space to feel free in. Welcomes you by eating into your dry clothes, making you part of it until you aren’t concerned with getting wet anymore. Speak into the cloud expanse, so sheer as to never sense the sound’s reflections. Remember underneath how much you are made of wet inside. Rejuvenating soup, breathe in the vapours deeply. The long, untrimmed summer grass in a rustling dance, moving as though marionette strings puppet each blade. Pattering. The strings flicker like static and tap dance across the purple-brick car park, the plastic sheet roofs, and the smoothening, shifting gravel. Past the left-open-window or hung-out-washing worries of onlookers, briefly paused to peer out from thick offices. The fields beyond the iron fence drink deeply. The splattered illusion of greens shining through the dense air, flora heaving gracefully to life in the humidity. 

Miniature explosions pepper windshields and gutters, flat leaves and lamp covers. Uncountable sounds blur and bleed into each other. The whole business park hums pure noise.

quitvision Pieces, Writing

The First Hours Of The New

The fresh sun hangs low, washing quietly across the avenue. A silent steady flow is carrying away the stillness of the cool morning, but leaving it pristine and untouched in the filtering shadows. Calmly casting warmth onto the side of your face as you turn across the softening driveway, but not yet entering your jacket. The chill on your ankles reminds you that you are alive. Your hand against the warm metal pane and your fingers searching for the icy cold keys. Maneuvering a goose-bumped wrist, pushing up a wide yawn from a glowing belly of coffee.

quitvision Pieces, Writing

A Cylindrical Truth

Why do people believe things? Because there’s a void in all of us that needs patching over. Because we can’t help but to see the logic that tethers our instances together. Because the basic truth is universal, but is splintered each time a new human looks at it. Every side of something so huge and definite cannot ever be fully taken in from the perspective of one staring skull. There is nowhere on earth you can stand to observe the entire sky, and even if you could, earth’s view is just one of infinite camera angles tracking in space. The shape of the truth from your angle of viewing is always a few degrees off from its shape to the person standing next to you. A cylindrical truth looks, to you standing head-on, to be a circle. But to the person at its side, the truth is oblong. And both are basically true. You are both right and are both observing the same thing as honestly as each other. And yet you disagree. The universal truth broke apart into two as you both realised it. Each of us has our one single life that takes one single path through existence, observing one single truth. Locked to us, exclusive, and unique to us. And one of the infinite shattered fragments of something bigger than we have space in our heads for. Every version is both completely true, and in complete conflict with the truth of every other.

quitvision Pieces, Writing

Singing Songs In Flat 7

I am relieved that I could finally pull together a song about moving on from the old apartment. It’s not always easy to find things to write about, especially when you live a pretty solitary lifestyle. You usually have to look a little deeper at the things that really mean something to you. If a lot of those things seem kind of mundane, you have to stare into them until you penetrate through to some meaning. It really doesn’t feel like it matters anymore. As long as you are close enough to something, you might be able to show an insight. Anything can be wonderful if it can be truly personal and real. And told in the right way.

Moving house is one of those things that is both a big change and also a pretty widely experienced event. Yet, there aren’t too many songs about it. There’s maybe ‘Sun In An Empty Room’ and then…

I spent a long time thinking about picking up and heading out in the months and weeks leading up to our moving. All the wide facts snaking through my brain in thick cables, orbited by every subtle implication, spinning off, discovered, and waiting to be. Very difficult to maneuver through with any grace, and so easy to slip through cracks and get lost in. This is how I mostly experience and process of change. I am unable to dodge or run from the infinite reflection. It’s only healthy to think stuff through and look back for a while. To avoid that responsibility to yourself is dangerous in its own way. My problem is that my mind over-indulges in reflection, going far past the point of usefulness, and sometimes so unnecessarily deep that the light starts to thin and the scale of things can warp out of proportion. I was so deeply worried, I didn’t want to forget anything about the place that had been the one consistent backdrop for the last couple of years of my life. It’s not the place, so much as the years of your life that feel so truly precious, and that’s what I get sentimental over. Not that I can’t live here anymore, but that those years of my life are drifting away and across a break in setting, over a threshold where just the place can no longer be looked at on its own to extract memories from. 

Maybe this is what familiarity is, a continuity that ties you together.

The place meant a lot to me through the lens of everyday life, the mundane and un-noteworthy ninety percent of seeing, feeling, breathing, and living. No less than the exciting remainder, blasé only in that there is just so much of this beautiful side of life that we sometimes forget how to enjoy it. A sheer plane that you need to glimpse the edge of sometimes to even know it’s there. When you approach the edges of the everyday, that is when you make out the definition. Moving house is one of these such edges, a miniature death of a version of you that in its last motions sees its entire life flash before its eyes, mourning itself before it is even gone.

quitvision Pieces, Writing

A Long Time Before…

If all we are are the feelings that rush through us, that sink anchors to the bottom of our stomachs, that light fires behind our eyes, and shoot lighting under the surface of our skin, that make our heartbeats echo; If all we are are our feelings, then he is not who he should be. 

The way he is looked at across the three-foot mile between them is the way he wants to be looked at forever. He wishes he was closer. They are drunk and they are dancing late into the night. Everyone else has slowly departed until it is only the two of them, mixing in the clarity of this rare abandonment. They are both quiet, they are both introverted, anxious, and creative. They are both smiling. They are both looking at each other a lot. They are both trying to seem like good dancers. She has told him he is not as unattractive as he believes himself to be. He has not told her that he thinks she is cosmically beautiful, with eyes like planets. He has not told her that he finds some of the things she says relatable in ways that he has not been able to relate to anyone before. He has not told her that when she is around him she brings with her an addictive constant nervousness. He has not told her that without his control there have been occasions when he has felt it in his blood that he should kiss her.

He has not said anything, to her or anyone with words. But what his body and his behaviour say to people wordlessly is a bountiful source of worry. He doesn’t know if anyone suspects that he is secretly harbouring this emotional chaos. He wants to tell her immediately, so he can know

what she thinks about any of this. In his daydreams, she feels the same way. She is gridlocked into the same position as he is, and his breaking confession triggers her’s. There have been enough conflicting signs to dizzily interpret that he truly has no idea how she feels. Totally convinced and then totally lost within hours on some days. She could bless him or execute him with her response, and things would explode in euphoric fizz or internal violence as the heavily pressurised feelings are blown open in an instant. He has no idea how much he might be hurt in that demolition, but what is certain is that it will wipe out the foundations he has built his life on. You can’t help how you feel, but it is his burden to meticulously hide it, to painfully squeeze this part of his heart down in a vice so it is small enough to remain out of sight. But not tonight.

Tonight is the colour of her eye contact, the shape of compatible physical motion. Tonight is the taste of how this might have acted out in another lifetime. This scene could be lifted directly from the alternate version of events, in which there is nothing to lose. His drunken heart whispers this to his disarmed brain, and he cannot help but wonder… Would he look into her calm eyes? Would they connect with his? Would she smile first with those eyes, then with her lips, then with her ultraviolet teeth? Would he pull together the nerve to sail closer? Would she drift in too? Would they start to generate electricity between them as their presences became closer than they had ever been? Would she brush his arm? Would their breaths shorten as the air between them became thin? Would he reach over the shoulders of grappling reason to put a gentle hand on her waist? Would his heart start to beat so strongly she could feel it through his touch? Would her hand find his hip like the seatbelt of a rollercoaster? Might he have to lean down to dance like this? Might that put their faces close enough to hear each other’s thoughts? Would he watch her eyes widen closely enough to catch his own already dilating in the swirling reflection of hers? Might he notice her lips fall open slightly, slipping out of their smile, and into something else? Might he feel every impulse in his body fire all at once as he feels her breath on his face? Might his blood spike when her eyes slowly shut? Might every one of his nerves shiver and shatter as their noses brush against each other? Might time slow as they hesitate millimetres away? Might their lips melt together? Might chemical reactions explode across their brains like fireworks in heavy air? Might her fingers move to trace his collarbone, the centre of his chest? Might he softly hold her cheek, her jaw, the top of her neck? Might their minds wash blank of anything that is not this and their heartbeats crack their ribs? Might they still feel the warmth of the other’s body after they finally draw back out? Might they now look at someone new to who they saw before, someone with which they have now done something irreversible?