Castles Made of Sand pt. 1

The following is a rather personal story. It's not easy to share, and the parties involved were in disagreement for a while about whether it should be. Well, time does indeed possess healing properties, and I think, a year after the fact, it's all alright.

 Castles Made of Sand

 I'm a lone figure in a vast expanse of white earth, sun high overhead in the sky, robbing me even of the company of my shadow. It's rays corrupt and render the innocent white a burning murderous glare. I squint, but the white invades my retinas, wipes my thoughts away, and leaves me empty.

I wander, for some indeterminate amount of time- time never seems tractable while one wanders- when suddenly the sound of rushing water cascades through the wanderfog in my head and sweeps me back into awareness. Perhaps the whiteness had distorted my sense of distance. Where I'd thought there had been only endless expanse, the horizon ends abruptly not twenty meters ahead of me. I approach the edge, or rather, the Edge, for this must be the Edge of the World. I peer over to see that the ground below me has tapered so that only an inch of frail earth supports my weight. For fear of falling, I crouch and crawl forward on my hands and knees. Finally nearing the edge, I peer into the depths below.

The French have a name for when you're in a high place, look down and suddenly feel the urge to jump. “L'appel du vide.” -The call of emptiness.- I suddenly feel the urge to answer. I can discern nothing in the void below me, but there's something irresistibly magnetic about it.

I lean further. A bit of the chalk-like earth breaks away under my grasp. It falls for scarcely a second before making a dull splash, impossibly bass-heavy. The echo reverberates, “into eternity,” my thoughts say. Sometimes the subconscious' ability to conjure one or two words out of billions of seemingly random processes, out of thousands of contradictory lines of thought, into one cohesive, elegant concept so aptly describing the semblance of a moment...it makes me smile, a smile that grows wider when I realize the paltriness of such a gesture in the face of such phenomena.

The sound of the rock hitting the water continues to echo. I lean further, perched perilously on that outlet of brittle, inch-thick earth. A fall time like that would suggest that the surface was really only a short reach away... of course if physics followed the same laws here, I'd have already plunged into the emptiness, following that splash all the way into eternity. Merely thinking about the fall gives the darkness below an ominous tint. OK. Hold my breath and hope for the best then. I stretch my hand further. I can sense the surface just beyond my fingertips. Suddenly it reaches to meet me, immersing my hand in cold. A real cold. The coldness of being stuck in a blizzard with a broken car-heater on a Thursday night, the coldness of the dinner that tried to wait for you. But at the same time I feel the cold of a sunny winter morning, when brumal spirits dance on your cheeks and waft amongst the curls of your breath, nourishing you with a certain heartiness and content with depth that somehow only exists in the winter months. The river is teeming with objects, which rush past my hand at impossible speeds, yet somehow barely graze it in the process. Strands of something tangle with my fingers. I get a firm hold and pull, rising to hold whatever it is under the sunlight for a better look. It's matted with something. Seaweed maybe.

No. Not seaweed. Hair. It's a head.

An idea springs into my mind, again seemingly from nowhere, the idea that the head chose to be pulled.

I drop it in a fit of shock and repulsion. It lands at my feet with a soggy, shudder-inducing thud. Once the shock wears off, I look more carefully. It's not human, but it's not like any animal I know. And there's something else. It's subtle, but I'm sure of it. It's changing, right before my eyes. It's eye-sockets move from the sides of its head to the front, it's canines grow and sharpen. Suddenly I feel like I'm being hunted. Ritually. I can hear war drums.

Surely it's only my heartbeat.

The horrific metamorphosis continues, picking up speed until the head is almost pulsating with the continuous growth and recession of horns and crests and fangs...Then stillness for a few brief seconds. Thump, thump, thump go the drums. Suddenly the flesh melts away and evaporates, leaving behind a clean, white, skull. Human. The blackness in the eye-sockets calls forth the very same emptiness of the the abyss from which it came.

But even this is temporary. Somehow the contour between the clean, white skull and the clean, white earth is becoming harder and harder to distinguish. I strain my eyes. I'm losing it...

And it's gone. The whole thing must have taken 10 seconds. Nothing takes its place. I notice that the intense glare of the sun has subsided, but my eyes still burn. They burn with the emptiness of the skull's hallow eyes and the smile, made cruel by the lack of flesh, the mocking smile that said to me, “Look well, I'm your skull. See how ugly I am?”

With the sunlight subsided, the earth now takes on a pallor that speaks only of feebleness and futility. I begin to feel weak as well. The air feels stagnant. The heavy rush of the water has become shallow and tinny. I don't even feel the earth crumbling beneath my feet. I'm gone before I hit the water...

Sirens. Motors. Shivering. It's 8am. I forgot to close the window last night. Every bone in my body cracks in rebellion as I slowly rise to greet the day. One step. I stub my toe on my laptop, which I must have left next to the bed last night before drifting off. The screen flickers to life.

[11/18/2011 4:40:13 PM] Please don't talk to me in the future. I can't keep doing this to you or myself. We are wasting time and hurting each other. Nothing is going to change. You will always be my friend, I know this, but right now, yes, I do see our friendship as a raincheck. So I think I need to stop talking to you. I don't want you to visit anytime this year, it's truly cruel to me to do that. I am sorry.

I've never tried to hide how pathetic I am from you, how hung up I am on you. I hope you can see that me wavering back and forth between wanting to talk to you and resolving not to, is not a game I am playing for your attention, but truly me just struggling to find something that works for me. I am sorry for how it may affect you.

My sorry attempt at a response remains unsent in the text-entry box, the type-cursor blinking expectantly for the rest. I see her face, equally expectant, indignant and disappointed. The blinking keeps track of every second passed since the message was started. 3,715,203 blinks.

I understand exactly what you're saying, and I know that I should know with the same conviction as you that a life together would be a happy one, but...

But what?!

I reread her message. Then I reread it again. Really I'm just staring blankly at the screen. It's just single, disconnected words jumping out at me. WASTING HURTING NOTHING FRIENDSHIP CRUEL PATHETIC WAVERING GAME SOMETHING THAT WORKS. 15 minutes have gone by.

Snap out of it!!!

I quickly minimize the window, throw some water in my eyes and turn on some music. Robert Plant's voice cries softly into a silk, nail-encrusted handkerchief.

Baby,

I'll leave you in the summertime,
Leave you when the summer comes a-rollin'
Leave you when the summer comes along.
Baby, baby, I don't wanna leave you,
I ain't jokin' woman, I got to ramble.
Oh, yeah, baby, baby, I'm believin',
We really got to ramble.
I can hear it callin' me the way it used to do,
I can hear it callin' me back home!
Babe...I'm gonna leave you
Oh, baby, you know, I've really got to leave you
Oh I can hear it callin 'me
I said don't you hear it callin' me the way it used to do?
Ohhh
I know, I know
I know I'm never never never gonna leave you babe
But I got to go away from this place,
I've got to quit you, yeah
Ooh, baby...
Baby, ooh don't you hear it callin' me?
Woman, woman, I know, I know
It feels good to have you back again
And I know that one day baby, it's really gonna grow, yes it is.
We gonna go walkin' through the park every day.
Come what may, every day
I'm gonna leave you--go away
It was really, really good.
You made me happy every single day.
But now!
I've got to go away!

Shit. There goes another 5 minutes. I grab a sheet from the stack of blank paper on the left side of my desk and begin scribbling:

Breakfast->8:45

Coffee->9:00

Coffee 2->9:15

Alg. Topology->12:30

Lunch->1

Commutative Alg.->4

Coffee 3->4:15

Analysis->7

Dinner->8

Riemann Surfaces->10

Write->11

SLEEP

Alright, that looks good. I look at my watch. 8:45. Shit. I erase breakfast from the list and scarf down a banana while heating a cup of coffee in the microwave. I return to my desk, coffee in hand and stare at the list. It stares back. I let the heavy, bitter, beautiful smell fill my nostrils and take my first sip. It scalds my tongue. The list is still staring at me. So is the clock in the corner of my computer screen. 9:03. Shit. I gulp down the coffee, tongue and esophageal nerves be damned. Before getting up I look through the list one last time and suddenly get the impulse, from who knows where, to add one more thing:

Write->11

< Réponds à l'appel du vide

SLEEP

Satisfied, I set the list atop the pile of paper on the right side of my desk. 43 days past, 43 lists made...

The day goes more or less as planned, plus 1 coffee and 17 minutes of lunch, minus 23 minutes of analysis, until 11 o'clock. Here I am again. Computer open in front of me. Cursor blinking expectantly........regularly.........hypnotically. I begin to nod off to the steady rhythm. My head gets cloudy. I even see dark clouds creeping into the fringes of my vision, enclosing my field of view around the blinking cursor, isolated on an island of blue-white computer nothingness.

No! Made a list, gotta stick to it. I shake myself awake, and the clouds recede, but only for a few seconds. It's no use. My eyelids feel like iron curtains, coming down to separate me from the world. With as much energy as I can muster, I throw myself face-first into bed. Sleep takes me in seconds...

“We were young.”

“We still are.”

The rush of water-eternal, or rather, water-timeless, swallows the silence between them.

“Is this real?”

“It's hard to say. I think so.”

“The sand feels real.”

“The sand?”

He hadn't noticed any sand. His awareness of it and the sand's physical existence seem to occur simultaneously. Had it been there before? It was old sand, smooth from ages of erosion. That white, confectioner's sand that warms just to body temperature, even under a blaring sun, so that tossing yourself into a ready-made dune is tossing yourself into the warm embrace of a powdery grandfather, bearing the same time-imbued earthy smell, but different in betraying no sign of the ages it's endured. Purity with, even stemming from, the depth of eons.

He digs his toes a little deeper into the sand, which gives without protest, happily filling the space in between his toes, as if it belonged there. Beneath the warm layer, the sand is cold. He closes his eyes and concentrates on the feeling. “Is this what sand feels like?” he thinks. “Perfect.”

“But then it can't be real,” she says.

He opens his eyes again. The sand stretches across the entire horizon. The sun is directly over their heads so that their bodies cast no shadows that might interrupt the perfect blankness of their surroundings. White on white, sky indiscriminate from earth. The reflection of the sunlight off the sand is blinding. It's hot. These are good signs. But something is off. “Maybe you're right. Maybe it's too real?” he says.

“What do you mean?” she replies.

“All this white. It's like when it's really foggy outside. You know? Like all that noise is drowned out and you look at your hand in front of you and it looks more real then it ever has before. Like too real. Too clear. It's like the essence of hand, but it's also more, because it's YOUR hand. You notice every blister, scar. You only ever noticed the shape of it, but now you can see all the wrinkles clustered around your knuckles... And you straighten your palms... Your knuckles look like the sleeping eyes of someone a hundred years old, but their alien. Their Yoda's eyes. It's like all the age and world-weariness starts in your hands and spreads from there. Isn't that the first thing you always notice about an old person? How old their hands are. How gnarled, lumpy, stiff, made of wood...”

She holds her hands in front of her. They are smooth, clean, soft and supple. That's not right. What does it mean? He closes his eyes. I close mine as well. What does it mean? She's right there. I concentrate hard. She has a scar from the time she cut her hand opening a can to feed her neighbor's cat. She'd fainted at the sight of her own blood. The matrix in the fingernails of her thumbs is warped from her nervous habit of rubbing them. Always rubbing them. When I think of her hands, that's what they're doing. Rub, rub, rub the lumpy, deformed nails, the thin line scar undulating like some prehistoric fish. Those hands were beautiful. Like books.

“I remember.” he says.

“Remember what?”

“Nothing.”

Those are her hands, sifting through the sand. Every detail is there.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

She is digging, digging with the long, skinny fingers of a piano player, hands made for delicate acts. She always meticulously cuts her nails down to her fingertips. He never understood why, but he loves that the first thing he feels when she touches him isn't hard, plasticine fingernail, but soft, warm, living flesh. The sand falls cleanly away from her fingers, for these hands are far too perfect to be sullied. I imagine the sand as soldiers crashing themselves wave after wave against a stone, white-washed wall, at once beautiful, ornate, and impregnable.

“Building a castle,” she responds.

Her dress is white too. A simple, elegant, white dress with a silky, golden, rope-like sash around the waist. I can't help thinking of Athena, the goddess of wisdom... and war.

I stand and watch from afar. I must stand out starkly against my blank surroundings, but they don't seem to notice me at all. He's leaning in close, running his hand softly and rhythmically up and down her back.

“For you and me?” he asks.

“For us, yes.”

“Let me help.”

“Alright. We'll start with the main tower.” She takes a few minutes, packing the sand in the bucket as tightly as possible, piling to the top over and over, yet somehow always divining a way to pack more in. “There,” she finally says.

“Hard as concrete,” he says, patting the top and nodding assuredly.

“I think it'll last forever, this tower.”

“So do I.”