#summer prose

[inkpressedpetals]

[thepaganhufflepuff]

Summer 7/15/2018

Still-wind nights,

are my favorite with you

Fire between us,

literally; figuratively

Laughing and talking,

Forgetting the rest of the world

Cicadas join the conversation

Filling the silence with the songs of summer

Hard to believe,

that all that matters is now

[inkpressedpetals]

[composedchaosmos]

Kanye West and Richard III

I'm taking an English course this summer, right, and my TA is weird because the highest discussion post mark he's given me had absolutely no quotes from the book. It only had a bunch of exerpts from Kanye West songs. I probably deserved a 3/10 or something. I just thought it would be funny to just fill my post with Kanye quotes, but whatever. The post was a reply to someone who had posted about some personality order diagnosis that some contemporary medical association had given to Richard. If you care about Shakespeare and Kanye, you might (but probably not) want to read this and then casually vomit in your mouth after. _

I think it is really interesting how you have brought up the contemporary diagnosis of 'anti-social personality disorder' for Richard. I also found it interesting that another contemporary figure of ego had referred to himself as a '21st century schizoid man' using a King Crimson sample in one of his songs appropriately titled 'Power.' I feel schizoid personality disorder, similar to Richard's apparent 'anti-social personality disorder', allows music celebrity Kanye West to bring to light the relation that ego has with personality disorders, as well as the entanglement of power and corruption. It might seem too easy to draw superficial connections to this music celebrity and Richard III, after Mr. West's last two releases have been titled 'My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy' and 'Watch The Throne', but the similarities between the two figures of ego and audacity seem too tempting to just ignore. Instead of poetic speeches, Kanye's dexterity rests in the language of music, and hence creates the duality of opinion towards him—the feeling of being appalled by his ego but an inescapable admiration for his charisma and adeptness with the musical language. In the same track 'Power', Kanye states, "Now I embody every characteristic of the egotistic / He knows, he's so fuckin' gifted." We cannot escape the feeling that Richard knew he too was gifted with language and used it so effectively to his advantage. Another line from the same song, "Where the bad bitches, huh? Where ya hidin'? / I got the power, make yo' life so excitin'" seems eerily similar to the way Richard used power as a way to sway both Lady Anne and Queen Elizabeth. In West's track 'Dark Fantasy' he relates the line "I fantasized 'bout this back in Chicago" which seems very reminiscent of Richard's earlier scenes of scheming, and in the same track he also claims, "Me found bravery in my bravado", similarly redolent of the audacious wooing Richard displayed towards Lady Anne and other bold speeches of his. By the time Justin Vernon's vocal sample drops, "Can we get much higher? So high," we cannot help but picture Richard climbing higher with every murderous deed he orders, and Kanye's line, "And the hell, it wouldn't spare us / And the fires did declare us" comes expectantly as we recall Richard's encounter with the ghosts and his ultimate fate at the play's end. But what seems so interesting is that Kanye realizes flirting with ego and power also means flirting with destruction. At the beginning of his track 'Power', Kanye states "No one man should have all that power." There seems to be an innate realization that the obsession of power comes with ill fate. Similarly to the way Richard dies the glorious death of a hero on the battlefield, Kanye states near the end of the same track, "Now this'll be a beautiful death." In conclusion though, I think the line from 'Power' that best summarizes the congruence between Richard and Kanye is this one: "At the end of the day, goddammit, I'm killin' this shit / I know damn well y'all feelin' this shit." And we all cannot help but feel that he is right. We are appalled by this obsession with power and ego and vulgarity, but this audacity and lingual dexterity in some dissonant way remains charming. 

[composedchaosmos]

Cold

He's in the corner of his kitchen, staring at his refrigerator. He's smiling and after a few minutes he gently whispers, hi. It's a level 'hi' -- gentle but firm. It's a little breathy and high, but it carries a sort of resolution. He's practiced it many times before. He whispers 'hi' because he's actually not staring at his refrigerator. He's smiling at Adele, the beautiful girl he met last summer. She's staring back at him smiling, her eyes meeting his eyes some five feet above the linoleum flooring of his kitchen. She accidentally bites her lip as he leans in a bit closer.  I missed your smile. He waits for a few seconds gazing deep into her unflinching eyes and she stands there smiling. He's channeling some sort of courage out of the back of his chest. That's where people channel courage out of he thought. He remembered reading that in a magazine a few years ago. Maybe it was last summer though, he had read a lot of magazines then. Do you want to be with me?  She was still smiling, breathing so gently, as if she wasn't breathing at all. You don't have to answer now. She doesn't respond. She's pretending to be a refrigerator door right now. He rests his nose against her soft cheek. It's unusually cold and smells of the synthetic rubbers they make souvenir magnets out of -- the ones that you can buy at gift shops all around the world. They're actually all made at the same factory in China. The ones you buy in Australia, in Austria, in Idaho, in North Carolina, at the local Chinatown near your house. They all smell the same. This is how her cheek smells. But if you smell hard enough you can smell a sweet floral scent. That's her scent. She's the only girl in the world that smells like that. You remember that smell from last summer. You close your eyes, but you can still tell she's staring at you. She's hiding something behind her back. Maybe it's a box of fresh organic arugula, or maybe just the chinese take-out you had leftover from eating alone last Tuesday night. It's probably going bad by now. But that doesn't matter, because she's about to give it to you as a gift, and that's what makes it special. You see her delicate white hands holding it behind her back, as if she's teasing you with it. Do you always order Fujian fried rice every single time you go there, she teases. But she doesn't actually say it aloud though because she's still pretending to be a refrigerator door. She says it with her eyes. They're wide open and glistening, amused, gentle. Yeah, I always eat it every Tuesday night. It reminds me of you. She waits a few seconds, and then takes a step back casually, as if she's reshuffling herself into a more comfortable position, but you can still feel her cool soft cheek against your nose. She's still smiling, but there's something archaic about it. Like the smile doesn't actually belong to her. Like the smile belonged to some girl who had lived thousands of years ago. Somehow it had been misplaced and it ended up on her face. She's staring at you still. But you're not sure that it's actually you she's staring at. It feels like she's staring at something behind you, like she's staring right through you. Maybe you don't actually exist at all. There's nothing behind you but your stupid kitchen sink. Why did you stop talking to me, Adele? You open your eyes again and glance back at her smile and it suddenly occurs to you that it is the saddest smile you've ever seen. You can feel the heaviness of her smile weighing down on you, as if the smile was a part of the air around you, the atmosphere. The space above your head suddenly feels so unbearably heavy. She takes another step back again. It's a little slower this time. Do you care that I exist? I mean, do I mean anything to you? You wish she'd drop her gaze, or look away because she was embarrassed or something, but she doesn't. She keeps staring at you -- wide-eyed -- amused -- smiling. It takes you a few moments, but you decide she's definitely staring at you, but at the same time you've never felt as invisible as this in your life. It's like she's staring at you but she's decided you are a ghost. You're not sure when she decided this, but you know it happened without you. I want to hold you Adele. Every second feels like a thousand years. Maybe seven thousand years pass before she takes another step backwards, followed by a few more. She stumbles a little on her fourth or fifth, and then she breaks out into a jog. But she's jogging backwards. It looks strange to you. She's still smiling at you, her eyes just as wide as they were last summer. Her smile just as gentle too. Her backward strides are a little clumsy, but in an adorable way. You breathe out words as she begins getting smaller and smaller in the distance, but you're not exactly sure what you breathed out. Maybe they weren't words at all. Ten minutes later she's a tiny dot in the horizon. She's probably somewhere in Europe right now where the sun is setting. You can barely see her she's so far away. All you can see are her eyes -- wide and gentle -- her eyes and also her lips, her thin red lips smiling gently at your ghost. Her smile is from a billion years ago. It's like a star. You can see it every night in the sky above your bed but you're not sure it still exists anymore. (short story archive here)

[composedchaosmos]

Expecting Ice Cream

You have to wait for a warm summer evening when the sky is a soft pink and the wind seems to be gently holding its breath. Only then could you walk into the ice cream shop at the t-junction a few blocks down the road and discover that we were innately created to be dismembered by hope. And how unsettling it must be when the odd irony envelops you as you hear children crying and screaming under the ice cream counter beside you. But you're not sure that it can really be called irony because you don't find anything really humourous about it at all. In fact, you can only really feel the heavy sadness that the sound of their crying carries. It is a dissonant sound, not pleasantly dissonant like the jazz station your mother's friend always plays in her cafe, but dissonance that makes your knees a little weaker than they already are. 

Someone once told you that all conflict was motivated by change, either a resistance to it or a desire for more of it. It sometimes seems absurd to you how harshly expectations could crush the summer breeze your heart would sing on those warm June afternoons sitting by your backyard patio. This is actually when the despair of that child in the ice cream shop down the street washes over you. In that momentary second, you are the eight-year-old girl who's ice cream got smothered onto the cargo shorts of a middle aged man in front of her. You are the little boy who took his little sister's ice cream cone for just a second -- it was only going to be a tiny taste or two -- only to be so unbearably abhorred by your own sister that you must begin screaming just as loud as her for fear of being labelled as a cold, calloused and self-removed individual. You are the freckled boy with glasses in the front of the ice-cream line that had asked his mother to bring him to this ice cream store two weeks ago, but now really needs to pee in this shop's non-existent washroom that had sat there in the store all these years waiting for you to be standing in the very front of the line so that it could not exist for you. It's that unbearable fear when we realize that what we don't have what we thought we had this whole time, when we find out a person has given a lot less of themselves to us than we initially thought they were giving, when we had patiently waited our whole lives for this very moment but we are instead lucidly watching ourselves roll in a pool of our own vomit -- defeated. Did we just vomit out the ice cream we paid $3.25 for? Why is this remorseless astral projection so sad and depressing? We are in an ice cream shop. We were meant to love where we are standing in, but we don't, because expectations have ruined everything. Why does hope even exist? At least if we had expected two months ago that we'd be rolling in this pool of our own vomit it wouldn't feel so bad, right? Expectations have only seemed to leave an unbearable bitterness in the corner of our mouth -- an unescapable bitterness that waves at you every morning when you pick up your mail.

But there are certain words that seem to swallow this ice cream shop anxiety. These words now have become that really touchy female friend you had in high school -- the one you were kind of attracted to but also innately disliked, both equally due to the fact that she was in fact so touchy. Every time she touched your arm, everything in the world felt right and perfect and at rest and you wanted to smile, and everything was perfect, except for the fact that she was touching your arm.

But all that's besides the point because you are in an ice cream shop and you're trying to pick the flavour you want so that you don't hold up the line when it's your turn to order, but the sound of children crying in front of you is making it impossible, because you know a part of you is crying as well. Everyday you wake up and feel like burying your head in someone's chest, or maybe their shoulder. You're not sure who, but it's like a repetitive motion. Your mind does it every couple of seconds so you don't collapse into disconsolation. It's a way of convincing yourself that someone's there for you. You want to bury it there so that you can leave your story on the front of her t-shirt with the soft graceful strokes of your tears, and holding that imaginary person, she tells you that she'll just have the same ice cream flavour as you. A few seconds later she corrects herself. She tells you she's a little undecided today, but she's feeling adventurous and she want you to choose for her. And you would choose for her right now -- in fact you figured out a few seconds ago you were having mint chocolate chip and you think she'd really like black sesame, and you could switch a few times on the park bench outside. But in that moment you can't really pick because you've decided you're never going to let go of her. You're face is never going to leave the soft floral scent on her shoulder. You're going to hold onto her for the rest of your life and keep crying.

(my short story archive is here)

[wcoshow]

[summer prose] by wco

"Summer, I've missed you. A lot. In fact, probably more than you will ever know. But that's OK, because you're Summer, and you don't worry about those kinds of things. That's what makes you so perfect. So beautiful...

Today was warm, and sunny, and bright... and the sky-- the sky! It was such a brilliant blue. Days like these are a true reminder of why they call this place Big Sky country...

And even the things I loathe about you, dear summer-- like mowing the lawn, or the ever looming fear of another summer spent mostly inside the dusty confines of a major retail store-- they don't compare to the things I hate about Fall, or Winter, or even Spring. They seem small. Insignificant. Weightless.

All throughout the year, there's only one season I truly miss. I may claim to love Fall, but she isn't quite as warm or friendly as you. I may seem happy to play in Winter's snow, but she can be a cold, mean bitch. And even when it seems like I'm smiling during a lonely walk in the Spring rain, you should know that it's not because I'm happy with her; I'm smiling because I'm thinking about how close I am to seeing your sunny face again.

Summer, let's spend the next few months smiling. I'll try not to give a damn about the future, and all the hopes and fears it contains. Let's just lay in the grass, and count the stars, and leave all our woes behind..."