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Title: Spring
Series: The Cycle of Seasons
Rating: PG
Word Count: 794
Summary: It was spring when we met.
Notes: First in a five part series concerning death. Written after obsessively rewatching and rereading Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead for a few weeks, during my senior year of high school. Kept for masochistic/sentimental value.
Sometime in the spring I wake up with a distinct feeling of wrongness. I am in bed – I am in a bed, with no idea as to whether or not it's mine or ours or someone else's entirely. My body is sore, and my mouth is dry. My mind is full of fuzz and strangeness, my memories insubstantial and unreliable. I know myself in only the most abstract sense and have none of the particulars of who I might be.
You are there, too, an unknown but not a threat. We have never met, before, and between us there is no sense of familiarity. But there is also a distinct lack of unfamiliarity and this makes it quite reasonable for us to wake together, and introduce ourselves with minimal awkwardness, before rising as one to make breakfast together. We acquaint ourself with our surroundings with ease, as though the place is one we once lived and have found unchanged a century later.
My irritation with your chatter slides on like a favorite coat during breakfast, and it seems entirely natural that we should take a walk together as the food settles in our stomachs. It's around this time that this irrational feeling of normality when all was so completely unfamiliar – the ease in which we two strangers slid into domesticity, the refusal of my emotions to accept that all was alien when my logic insisted upon it – begins to grate on my nerves and I try to rebel against it.
When you reach out to touch my shoulder, I shove back the part of me that continues to insist that all is well and shrug you off roughly. You look at me then, eyes gone impossibly wide with hurt and I feel a twinge of conscience. It goes the way of my internal reassurances and we walk on.
“Do we know each other?” you ask, at length, quiet and uncertain. The tone is not one I've heard you use, and there is nothing in it to suggest as much, but I know as soon as you speak that I must be kind or you'll cry.
“I don't think so,” I say. “Or, in any case, I don't believe we've ever met. But I certainly feel as though I know you.”
“Oh, yes,” you say, eagerly, beaming at me from eyes that shine like stars. “It feels as though I've known you all my life. But I could swear that I've never seen you before today.”
This gives me pause, but just for a moment.
“What is today?” I ask, without much hope. A minor detail, of course, but nothing is so important as a trifle. It seems that that thought, that particular turn of phrase, is not original, but it's origin, like the everything else, is lost to us. We walk on.
There's a river flowing in the woods around the place we've left, or perhaps it's a stream, flowing sadly along the bottom of a ravine. You suggest 'creek' as an alternative and my irritation is such that I snap at you without thinking. I turn away before I can see the sorrow in your face and focus on the water flowing over the rocks. It's a familiar sight, in that it's one all people carry with them, whether they've ever stopped to look or not. I've never been here before, and I don't think you have either, but we stop as though it's a routine. I ignore your imploring gaze and move away down the creek, leaning into the first tree fit for leaning.
You stay where you are and, just as I knew you would, you eventually transfer your attention to the moving water below.
And so it is, for a while. You stand and I wait until once again you're distracted by the movement of the leaves or the creak of a tree limb. You wander, pacing the edge and looking everywhere but down. I watch your feet, half convinced you'll stroll over the edge in your abstraction. When, eventually, you begin to climb down, into the water, I follow. You aren't expecting it and when you look back and see me, standing knee deep in the water behind you, you smile, a little, and say, “I think I know you.”
“No, you don't,” I say. “We've never met.”
I hear a dull roar coming from somewhere up stream. You look around, bemused, and I feel my eyes beginning to prickle. I fold my arms behind my back and stare up at the sky, which is looking particularly blue, today. When my eyes begin to feel hot, I close them.
You make a frightened little sound, then, and it's almost a surprise when the water comes and washes everything away.
Series: The Cycle of Seasons
Rating: PG
Word Count: 794
Summary: It was spring when we met.
Notes: First in a five part series concerning death. Written after obsessively rewatching and rereading Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead for a few weeks, during my senior year of high school. Kept for masochistic/sentimental value.
Sometime in the spring I wake up with a distinct feeling of wrongness. I am in bed – I am in a bed, with no idea as to whether or not it's mine or ours or someone else's entirely. My body is sore, and my mouth is dry. My mind is full of fuzz and strangeness, my memories insubstantial and unreliable. I know myself in only the most abstract sense and have none of the particulars of who I might be.
You are there, too, an unknown but not a threat. We have never met, before, and between us there is no sense of familiarity. But there is also a distinct lack of unfamiliarity and this makes it quite reasonable for us to wake together, and introduce ourselves with minimal awkwardness, before rising as one to make breakfast together. We acquaint ourself with our surroundings with ease, as though the place is one we once lived and have found unchanged a century later.
My irritation with your chatter slides on like a favorite coat during breakfast, and it seems entirely natural that we should take a walk together as the food settles in our stomachs. It's around this time that this irrational feeling of normality when all was so completely unfamiliar – the ease in which we two strangers slid into domesticity, the refusal of my emotions to accept that all was alien when my logic insisted upon it – begins to grate on my nerves and I try to rebel against it.
When you reach out to touch my shoulder, I shove back the part of me that continues to insist that all is well and shrug you off roughly. You look at me then, eyes gone impossibly wide with hurt and I feel a twinge of conscience. It goes the way of my internal reassurances and we walk on.
“Do we know each other?” you ask, at length, quiet and uncertain. The tone is not one I've heard you use, and there is nothing in it to suggest as much, but I know as soon as you speak that I must be kind or you'll cry.
“I don't think so,” I say. “Or, in any case, I don't believe we've ever met. But I certainly feel as though I know you.”
“Oh, yes,” you say, eagerly, beaming at me from eyes that shine like stars. “It feels as though I've known you all my life. But I could swear that I've never seen you before today.”
This gives me pause, but just for a moment.
“What is today?” I ask, without much hope. A minor detail, of course, but nothing is so important as a trifle. It seems that that thought, that particular turn of phrase, is not original, but it's origin, like the everything else, is lost to us. We walk on.
There's a river flowing in the woods around the place we've left, or perhaps it's a stream, flowing sadly along the bottom of a ravine. You suggest 'creek' as an alternative and my irritation is such that I snap at you without thinking. I turn away before I can see the sorrow in your face and focus on the water flowing over the rocks. It's a familiar sight, in that it's one all people carry with them, whether they've ever stopped to look or not. I've never been here before, and I don't think you have either, but we stop as though it's a routine. I ignore your imploring gaze and move away down the creek, leaning into the first tree fit for leaning.
You stay where you are and, just as I knew you would, you eventually transfer your attention to the moving water below.
And so it is, for a while. You stand and I wait until once again you're distracted by the movement of the leaves or the creak of a tree limb. You wander, pacing the edge and looking everywhere but down. I watch your feet, half convinced you'll stroll over the edge in your abstraction. When, eventually, you begin to climb down, into the water, I follow. You aren't expecting it and when you look back and see me, standing knee deep in the water behind you, you smile, a little, and say, “I think I know you.”
“No, you don't,” I say. “We've never met.”
I hear a dull roar coming from somewhere up stream. You look around, bemused, and I feel my eyes beginning to prickle. I fold my arms behind my back and stare up at the sky, which is looking particularly blue, today. When my eyes begin to feel hot, I close them.
You make a frightened little sound, then, and it's almost a surprise when the water comes and washes everything away.
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