Your laptop dings and you stare blankly at the question laid against the cheery blue backdrop of iMessage. If your friend had posed the query under any other circumstance, you wouldn’t consider the answer an issue. But here you are, in the twilight zone created when all the lights near Steinbach go dark and the air gets dim and hazy while the sun fades into the wintry evening. The few stray bulbs that stay on remain barely flickering. It’s then, in this solitude and silence— save for the faint buzzing of electricity and the hum of the radiator— when it is far too easy to get a bit too thoughtful. It’s bound to happen— what else would happen in a place where you’re left alone with your thoughts and nothing else? You pull out some homework, try …show more content…
Go slow, be careful, they say. NOT what you asked. ‘Have a crush on someone dealing with trauma?’ asks Google. No, you say. No— the word spills out of your open mouth and pours out into the breeze, screaming to the endless field in your mind where the moonlight stretches wide and the light is bright and dapples the verdant moonscape where the sky is more blue-grey than black and lights twinkle from far off edges where the tall stalks of grass gently caress the roots of forest trees. There is a certain emptiness to this place, the potential for beauty, an ethereal silence that hovers and perches at the edge of the misty horizon. The light is gentle, hazy, present as it sits cautiously alongside the moor. It is safe, yes, and gorgeous— a reprieve from the world where you can breathe and be alone. But alone is often lonesome, and sometimes silence is overpowering, and there comes a time when your heart …show more content…
This is why your laptop baffles you, the text going unanswered and your cursor blinking into unseeing darkness. Beyond your control, beyond your grasp… this is where Google falls so short that it doesn’t even make it to the starting line. You know the rabbit holes that self-psycho-analysis will run you into. You avoid them diligently and make an effort to just let yourself feel each emotion in the moments as they occur, without rancor or disdain or attempts to analyze yourself as you might a literary character, parsing together the patterns of your past and their connections to the memories you don’t dare to air. Even so, you see the irrational guilt and fear and worry and all of those emotions that mix with the minute, sharp rushes of joy and exhilaration that run like infinitesimal comets across the sky, their tails fading into the night as quickly as they arrived. Here lies your issue, quantified. “Sure,” you had responded to your friend’s earlier text. “I’m always up for some girl talk.” You hadn’t the foggiest that the most trite of stereotypical questions would unintentionally reduce your heart to confusion that hurts like