Still

I collapsed into the chair. My skirt probably flared up a bit and showed my legs. I’ve heard that whenever that happens, the Honor Code angels get goose bumps down their spines and its extremely uncomfortable. That’s probably just a rumor. But who’s to say, really.

The chair swallowed my weight with encouraging silence. Chairs that creak are worse than a personal trainer screaming in your face as you cry in your last half mile on the Godforsaken treadmill. I like silent chairs the best. Especially in this zone of the library, where backpack zippers moonlight as chainsaws and terrify the innocent townspeople, so intent on cramming for midterms that ripping your noisy face off suddenly becomes a viable option.

Oh, BYU. How I love you. 

Moving on. 

I am consumed by words. It’s just one of those days, I think. It didn’t start off that way, before I collapsed into the silent chair and began comparing my fellow students to characters in a horror film. It began with sameness. I woke up tired, remained in that state through work. The bike ride home in the chilled November air threw off the remaining vestiges of sleep, as it faithfully does every Friday morning. I cooked an egg in the pitted hole of half an avocado. I but on my royal blue sweater, smacked my lips together and submitted to my stubborn hair, and headed to class. I sat through class. I think we learned about economic systems in undeveloped countries and microloans and how to dramatically change someone’s life with the meager funds of $25. I don't know, I could be wrong. Then I meandered some more, from one side of campus to another, looking for a place to reside until my next class.

Then something happened.

Promptly at noon, someone began throwing words my direction. No, I can’t even describe them as words. They were honest to goodness lifelines, those sounds that reverberated through the stale air of the packed auditorium that replaced my writing class for the day. They woke something up within me that has laid doormat for quite some time now through my suppressive techniques of stress and fear. Stress and fear, fear and stress- not today. I don’t have time for them today.

Those lifelines those anchors those matches. They woke me up. Because that thing that has laid quiet for so long, I think- I think that thing was me. My very soul was hiding in the corner of my heart, waiting for the roaring of needlessly immediate decisions to succumb so it could be heard. That happened today. Those words quieted my life and I found more words of my own.

So I sat down and placed my fingers on my keyboard and this came out:

People are really quite beautiful but they're also really quite shy about it. I don’t mean aesthetically beautiful. Not something that other people can see. That beauty is fake and it’s a cover up and it’s something that people have substituted for the real thing because it’s easier to fake beauty than reveal your inner concepts. But real beauty- raw and innate and not developed but simply unearthed- real beauty is something that we are aware of but we often refuse to show. It comes out when we have babies or fall in love- real love, not what they show you in the movies. It comes out when we see a piece of art that reflects itself. We work so hard to cover it up because it shows a part of ourselves that we don’t come close to understanding. To show it is to be vulnerable. Sexiness is not vulnerable, sexiness is a part of a power structure developed by those who understood that to convince people of a false power provides a way to get what they want. But beauty? Real, unconscious, innate beauty? That is vulnerable. It is the part of us that cries for no reason at all when reading literature. The tears just pop up, like they are being summoned by words that were written by another person’s sense of miracles. It is the air that gets caught in our throats when we hear something that we swear we’ve heard before. And we remember it. And that is why we can’t breathe because we finally remember something that once meant something to us. But then you cover it up with a cough and that beauty is gone and others can no longer see it and they look at you with relief but also a bit of veiled disappointment because they instinctively felt that beauty coming from within you and that lit something in them that they’ve been trying to hide behind but you coughed instead and then we were all safe underneath our covers. Sleeping our miraculous days away in the veil of fear.

I know. It makes no sense. But that’s what happened and I think I was trying to tell myself something.

And then I collapsed into my current chair and looked up. Two flights of stairs away from me, a young girl was simultaneously looking down. She laughed when our eyes met, not embarrassed or ashamed. She laughed and I slowly smiled, and then I shut my eyes to the miracle of that moment, ducked behind my laptop and continued to be consumed by myself. 

I need to learn how to listen.