Last One [Journal Series]

This last entry is another “Free” entry from my school journal. As with the others, the link to the scanned images of the original pages follows the text. My teacher’s remarks are in red this time.
If you’re just tuning in, Start Here

12.14.1994

I am blind, everything is out of focus… every once in a while I focus on someone as though I am fading in and out of two worlds: my own and reality. My world is not far from yours or reality but it is another one. I cannot leave my world for more than a few moments, for I would be as helpless as a turtle on its back. My world is a prison, but I am allowed these visits. The prison is not for punisment, but for protection. Sometimes I am fooled by my reflection in the glass* and see someone as a shadow of myself.

I took a trip today and I saw someone new. Someone I have seen from time to time but now I see as someone else. The eyes cannot perceive what the ears hear. I watched her enter the room and pursue her intentions. I made her smile with a kind smile of my own and my impression of her was slightly altered by the sight of her change in expression. In appearance she is no angelic beauty and she is relatively slim for her height; she has dark eyes that are given a subtle tenderness by her eyebrows and the surves of her cheeks, nose and forehead. The end of her nose curls slightly upward and is accentuated by the habitual permenancy of her raised upper lip that displays her teeth with a firmly set jaw. This apparently unemotional expression is framed by untamed long, dark hair — giving her and almost animal-like appearance. In motion she appears awkward — she walks with her head bent forward and from under the brows that shadow her eyes. She stares down to the floor ahead of her or straight ahead to the path in front, and her step is a brisk stride or a sliding step mixed with regular step. This is how she had always appeared to me in my mind’s eye until today.

Until now I had never heard her speak and as I said before, the eyes cannot see what the ears hear and that can make all the difference. When she was finished with her business in the room, she passed by me and softly spoke a few words more to the general area than directly to me, but, with the tilt of her head and the volume at wich they were spoken, I knew they were kept between us. It was the sound of her voice that completely change how I viewed her. It was so sweet and melodic that it seemed accidentally so. It was simple words spoken with that beautiful voice that tickled my soul. I see her in a completely different light now — one I cannot describe. The words themselves were nothing more than an expression of her displeasure with a day’s events as though she was trying to excuse herself for something. Simple words, but I saw her through that shadowy reflection of myself in the glass between us when she spoke them. Was my vision obscured byt the reflection again? or was the mirror there? All this thought was inspired by a few moments… she will remain nameless.

*reference to the glass that seperates visitors from convicts during prison visits. Kind of an odd reference, but I’m pretty sure I’d just seen “Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead.” — an odd movie — when I wrote this.

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