solid and sound

Static surrounded her bare foot in the water.

The words dripped off the smooth pages:

'to life solemn and deplete

filled only of silent hollow echoes,

stay alive.

wade through the sinking sand

until tides recede

leaving you

solid and sound.'

No one could hear the words whispered through the simmering black ink.

What do you do with it when you can't throw it away but you can't keep it either? She wrapped it in burlap in penance. Like penance, the harsh friction of the burlap would remind her not to open it even when she couldn't see.

They wanted her to see the world, but most of all they wanted to see the world. So before the end of her first decade, she was stamped entering and exiting all 7 continents. Understanding all the languages, she was forced to learn everything quickly to guide her dumb mother and her blind father. She spoke softly. When not heard, she wrote fiercely. On some of these continents, she learned never to utter a sound just to watch and listen. She learned to speak without thinking only to her small black notebook.

She had dark round eyes that glimmered in the dark moonlight and reflected the energy passed through light years from the stars. Though pale with greying hair, she grew up darker than intended from the summers spent practicing the perfect set, the perfect serve, the perfect save. When she heard the word anti-semitic for the first time in high school, she understood it to mean not a clash of religion or culture, but the vessel created to embody and convey both. The vessel sinking at sea contained nothing but water swaying back and forth going nowhere, adding to nothing, taking away all hope. And so in a completely different way, she was anti-semitic. She saved her voice so carefully, no one could remember what it sounded like.

When pained, she would laugh. When drunk, she would laugh even louder. Tears would only fall when she knew the vessel could do nothing when something had to be done, not for her but everyone else.

That day, barefoot and blinded by the echoes, she unwrapped the burlap. The years of friction had smoothed out the ever small fissures in the soft black binding. The friction kept the torrent, poured out in concrete words, soft and wet. Written in that small black notebook were the words she spoke but no one heard. In black ink, the thoughts she didn't have to think created boundaries, broke rules, and freed imagination.

The idea that faith requires imagination led her to think deeply about what creation is. She wondered why everyone requires imagination to work through sadness, enjoy happiness, even be still. She mulled deeply over why the disinherited inherently have an immense capacity for this. Imagination was required to find truth. When rendering buildings, she had to imagine light entering windows and casting shadows. Like truth, though solid objects, the eye doesn't see depth in them unless light enters and casts shadows upon them.

In the burlap wrapped black notebook, she tried to bury herself. The words were the roots and the seed. She was the roots and the seed. Remotely, she looked at herself in the rearview mirror while trying to drive forward. Her eyes were her only headlights under the dark moonlight as she tried to calculate the madness of people, a feat even Newton thought was far more difficult than calculating the motion of heavenly bodies. Exercising patience, not idling anymore, she found everyone's shadow grey.

Most people find hope in the grey moments, looking at the shadows of what was before and what could lay ahead. Few see clearly the brightness of the present. Because no one stands above or below.

Being denied, failing, falling but concurrently accepted, succeeding, and rising, her imagination pushed past the boundaries of those pages, spilled into the world. Losing to friction, having amassed all the static potential energy, she became solid and sound.