Sep 24, 2015 Daily Life, Writing 101
Sorry, I had no time to re-create a day today — so I cheated (sorry!) and am re-posting an old “day-in-the-life” post of mine) for this assignment
Meditations Upon Walking on Solid Water
(Reposted an earlier post from my other blog, which is now private)
©By Vijaya Sundaram
January 25, 2014
I had never walked on water in my entire life. Today, with quaking heart, I did.
It wasn’t too bad. It was lovely, in fact.
To think that there was a pond filled with water which teemed with possible life, which would, in springtime and summertime, have ducks and geese, and frogs and fish, which now supported my weight, and sang it’s safe, it’s safe to my internally trembling self!
(I was fine on the outside, although I wanted to get on it, go across and back as quickly as possible. For, despite all the assurances and reassurances by my husband, who said, “I grew up near a lake, don’t worry, this pond is frozen solid, look!” and jumped on it, all my cells shrieked, No! It isn’t. Don’t!)
My daughter, intrepid and impatient with me, said, “Come on, Mom! It’s great! See? And she walked on ahead of me, following my husband.
I knew that she was anxious for me to enjoy it like she did. So, I put on my brave face, and squared my timid shoulders, and did.
Something interesting happened then. I wasn’t afraid, anymore. I put my trust in my husband and my child, and walked on solid water. Ice is interesting. It has personality. It has stillness. It is mysterious, a presence that could be either kind or cruel. It was kind to us today. No betrayals lurked beneath its opacity.
Then, we went back to the main trails in the woods where we were walking. We walked in companionable silence punctured by occasional inconsequential chatter in the dark stillness of the night-time woods, lit by snow. We heard the creaking of an occasional tree, as we wound our way up to the very top of the hill in the woods.
There we stood on snow-covered rocks, and looked down on the intermittent shoals of cars, exotic fish of gold and red streaming towards us and shimmering away from us on the highways far below. The lights of the city gleamed jewelline in the winter night. A faraway airplane took off, glittering into the sky, from the distant airport.
Our daughter is a child of winter, and a child of these woods. The woods are hers, that hilltop and its tower belong to her alone (also to us, by extension), and that pond we walked on has been part of her consciousness since she was about twenty-two months. She gazed around and exclaimed over and over, “It’s so beautiful here, isn’t it?” And she sighed and sat on a snow-covered rock, gazing into the night. My husband and I murmured in agreement, as we stood and gazed out, eyes saturated with the lights of the night.
Permanence is an illusion, I know, but I like to think that these words and that pond are part of the permanence of her memories. I want for us to build a universe of memories. These will sustain her (and us) through what is sure to come in the future, because the future is always jealous of the present.
And the present is our gift from the Lords of Time.
____________________________The End___________________________________
Tags: A Day in the life of ..., Family time, walking in the woods in the winter, Walking on ice
Sep 24, 2015 Writing 101
A Thousand Fragments of Self
(A very short story about brokenness and wholeness)
©September 24th, 2015
By Vijaya Sundaram
She was one with the dark, all thousand fragments of her. She sat at the table, her glass of water, a cylinder of dim light in a shaking hand, catching the passing light of a moonbeam.
She gazed, unseeing, into the distance. Water flowed down her tongue, down her throat down her gullet, and into her roiling belly. She felt its coolness settle somewhere within, a pool of quietude in a vast, drying prairie. A memory of the evening swept over her suddenly, and the coolness was replaced by fire.
The glass of water and her shaking hand blurred before her eyes, while the darkness collected around her hair, her eyes, her shoulders, her knees, her ankles.
Suddenly, her solitude was too much to bear. She reached for the kitchen light, and the darkness retreated to the far corners of the next room.
In the harsh electric light the water glinted. She looked around at the pictures on the far wall, and at her yellow and white-painted kitchen cupboards, and at the simple kitchen island where she had placed a bunch of sunflowers, and she wondered how she could erase herself, how she could start over, how she could undo what had happened to her when she’d walked home alone that night, and how she had made it out of the attack alive, but scathed, beaten, broken within, collapsing on her apartment doorstep, shaking, dry-sobbing.
She was alone, all alone. There was no one she could turn to, not at midnight. The house was still, listening to her.
Somewhere below the pit of her roiling belly swirled a fire of pain, and the bile arose in her throat. All that was beautiful in the world had burned into a little ash-heap somewhere. This phoenix could not regrow its feathers.
She could not recall a single happy moment from her previous life in the horror of the here and now, but her glass of water, a cylinder of light in a shaking hand, glinting, distracted her, and she held it as a drowning person might, except that this was water, and she wanted to drown in it.
Gazing at her cylinder of light, she let her mind wander, a lost creature in a vast prairie filled with wolves.
And the glass of light glinting liquidly calmed her. She though briefly, in her grasshopper mind that leaped around to avoid dwelling on pain and horror, about how the shapes of things change with the containers they’re in.
She thought: I shall change mine.
With her shaking hand, her cylinder of glass-water still glinting, darkness still retreating at the edges of the pool of light, she reached for the switch. The darkness flooded back in, and she became one with it.
A glass of water spilled, and shattered into a thousand fragments.
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This short story is in response to the prompt for Writing 101 Day 13: Compose a Series of Vignettes
Tags: #Original Short Story by Vijaya Sundaram, Fragments of self