Unstuck

Slowly wandering through the yard at dusk, Annette looked up into the darkening sky and tried to maintain a sense of self even as the barely visible panoply of stars above made her feel tiny, insignificant and alone. If she had been the crying type of girl this would have been a moment, maybe, when a tear or two would have streamed down her soft cheek. She couldn’t explain why. She wasn’t sad, exactly, and not quite upset. She was just slightly overwhelmed and slightly underwhelmed and she felt a bit of a mess inside. Annette was not the crying type of girl, however, and whatever difficult-to-express emotions she was feeling, she kept them as tightly bottled as usual.

The word she used to describe this unpleasant and annoying sensation was “unstuck.” Annette felt unstuck rarely, but when it happened, it was hard to remedy. It was a vague sense of non-accomplishment, of disgust at her own perceived mediocrity, of nebulous worry that she was missing something better and a prickly fear that she had settled for too little. She wasn’t displeased, generally, with the state of her life, but she did, at times, ache for something grander or bigger or more exciting than her day to day routine could throw at her. While most of the time that routine settled on her shoulders easily, like a comfortable shawl, other times it felt like an unbearable burden of obligation and repetition. And when she acknowledged that weight, she felt herself becoming unstuck from her life. And she disliked that feeling a great deal.

And so, as the world draped itself in its starry quilt, Annette moved in slow motion through the cooling evening air, feeling every footfall as it sent tiny shudders through her bones and nerves and muscles. She was very aware of the cricket chirps, a far off freight train, the cries of children at play and the low level hum of traffic on a nearby busy thoroughfare. She was very steady in her breath and very measured with her heartbeat and she felt uneasily at ease, a condition that she was all too accustomed to. It brought with it a sort of melancholy nostalgia, the type of creaking bone weariness that falls like soft rain in a crackling, black and white old film. It brought with it a set of memories, of half-forgotten waking dreams that began to unspool in her mind’s eye. It brought with it a heaviness that made her slump, cross-legged, on the newly damp grass.

Things were fine, she would tell herself in those moments of being unstuck. But they weren’t fine enough. As she sat on the lawn, her hopes, usually tamped down by reality and subverted into half-attempted hobbies and diversions, rose up out of her like curling steam breath on a frosty winter morning. Her eyes, normally heavy lidded and rimmed in sleepless black circles, opened wide and began to sing out with brilliant color and radiance. She was almost luminescent, barely lit by a sliver of silver moon, but somehow glowing of her own volition. Her veins were lit from the inside, spidery highways of hot pink and electric blue showing through the pale shell of her skin. Shafts of white shot through from her fingernails, phasing through the night air and rising up to the spackles of drifting black clouds like ten miniature spotlights. Quicksilver seemed to pour from her shimmering mouth, lifting up into the air, zeppelin-like and beautifully awkward, and it formed unheard notes from some imaginary symphony still being composed in the recesses of her brain. Owls beat their wings above her and flew from the crests of nearby trees to form a halo of ghostly feathers around her flowing, liquid hair. The bones of dead things rose up from the ground beneath her, clattering and yellowed with age. They seemed to build up a cage around her, a barrier wall to protect her. The air around her crackled with electricity and power. Her neighbors’ televisions lit up with white noise static. Their phone calls were shredded with a squall of shrieks and whistle. Annette, unstuck and unglued from her life, was Screaming Potential, a being of pure creative energy, like a pocket of God alight in the midst of her tiny suburban neighborhood.

There she saw it, every thread, every conceivable movement and motion and possibility. Reality lilted around her, made of nothing more than crepe streamers of reflective chrome, filaments of pulsing emerald, drizzled lines of deep crimson and shadowy strings of smoke and soot. They drifted about in insanely intricate patterns, forming geometric webs and slippery amoeba wheels that spun into amorphous nonsense before reverting, strictly, back to grotesque organization. It was revoltingly complex and disturbingly simple and it would have driven Annette mad if her brain were still designed with folds of gray matter and neurons firing across synapses. She was greater than it, now, though… aloft in the formless and rigid sea of creation. Her life, her tiny little life, was spilled out in marvelous array across a hundred, a thousand, a million… an endless parade of happenings and moments and instances and events.

Her childhood rewritten in every conceivable language.

Her first kiss, retold in infinite variety.

Each and every version of her love and her desire and her want and her need flashing in seizure strobe chromatic chaos across the depth and breadth of all time.

She saw the best of it, the worst of it, and the crushing middle space in between it all as she stared off into the types of woman she could be, should be, could have been or would become. She felt it, then, the twinge of insignificance burrow into her skin and cut, razor sharp and scalpel accurate into the deep gory bends of her soul. And all at once, the power was cut, the show was over, the damage was done and the curtains, singed by the stage light heat, were drawn. The potential drained out of her, lost through the pores in her skin, through her nostrils and her lips. She felt a nauseating loss of control and a wave of gut-kicking dizziness that sent her crashing, still cross-legged, onto her back. The cold dew of the grass was refreshing and the stars above were still lovely and still gapingly vast in scope.

Things were fine, she told herself. The world righted and she sat up, barely aware of what had happened but aware enough to still need to stifle the urge to cry. She wouldn’t cry about it. There was nothing to be done now. Choice after choice, circumstance after circumstance had led her here. And it was ok. Not because of anything she’d done, not because of any fate or destiny or reasoning or plan, but solely because it had to be ok. She was blinking and she was breathing and her heart still pumped and warm blood still coursed through her veins. She had no choice but to accept it, to break down the wild hopes and stuff them back down where they belonged. She had a life and it was enough, even if it hadn’t been the bliss filled adventure she’d been promised as a little girl. She swallowed her dreams back down, felt a shudder of regret or remorse or worry or something maybe a little like all three and then held her breath as some dark tufts of cloud shut out the moon and left her alone in the dark.

Things were fine, she told herself. She lifted herself up from the ground, brushed herself off and meandered inside the house. Things were fine. But they weren’t really fine enough.