One Man's View Of Life

A first person account from a man lying in the grass, watching other people in the park. Go to http://andrewhenleywriting.wordpress.com for more of my writing.

I lie down in the park and the grass soaks into me. A lush denizen. The mechanical white noise of a bumblebee’s wings pushes its way through the silence around me. Its fuzzy yellow and black body zigzags through the blue and white patches of imperfect sky. From behind the thin wisps of white, a glowing solar sphere. I squint, and the glare dissipates until a darker cloud swallows the light again. The air cools and as I close my eyes the grass becomes quicksand that absorbs me.

 

I open my eyes back to the world. As if it were fleeing a coal mine, a canary sprints by in the air. It disappears as suddenly as it arrived. A blonde woman walks past with pink feather ear rings. A blue gemstone has taken up residence above one of her thinly shaped eyebrows. Her hair is a Jenga tower, messily stacked. Flaxen strips curl around each other, climbing and creating dark caverns. Coal mines. A scarlet rose is tattooed on her shoulder, its thorny stem wrapped tightly around her arm. It looks painful. Her sleeveless denim vest is also tattooed, with a black and white butterfly hovering over a lily. An army of safety pins have begun to scale her tight leather jeans, but the silver spiked studs of her belt put them off climbing any higher. Her boots have beetle-crushing soles, thick like door steps. They give her an extra three inches, easily. She looks out of place. But she looks happy. Beneath me, the sharp blades of grass are like a Chinese bed of nails I relax into, despite the discomfort.

 

A dog barks. I jolt, firmly enough that stiffer, sharper grass could have impaled me. The dog has a deep, guttural tone that would be the elegant, respected voice of a King, or at the very least an Earl, in the animal kingdom. A pointy edged, black German Shepard with matted fur gallops into the open plain. The aroma of damp overtakes the slightly icy sting of the wind. A young couple sit on a clean, white picnic blanket. The woman has dark hair and a blue skirt. The man’s hair is darker, his blue shirt is lighter. The muddy paws of the dog stain their blank canvas. A tightly wrapped bun controls the woman’s hair, while the man’s is slicked back heavily so not even a single strand can escape.

 

A black man in a white vest runs past. His posture is stiff, firm and athletic. His hair is cornrowed. He is one of the few who suits it. An iPod is strapped to one of his bigger than necessary forearms. The white wire of the headphones bounces loosely. A black Nike headband halos his head. I put my weight on my arms and push myself up to watch him. My arms cramp and give me a dull, manageable ache. Running, he puts too much force into bringing his knees up. All the force should go into hammering the legs down, the rising should just happen naturally. I put hours into training my legs to move like that. I try now, to whirr my leg in the correct motion. It burns. Not the familiar kiss of lactic acid coursing through me, but the white hot pain of tendons ripped from bone as easy as plug from sockets, switching off. Disconnecting. That infinite pain, where wounds are scars and the pain doesn’t heal. My leg returns to its usual useless position and I watch the man and his ugly running style slowly pass out of my view. All that time I spent alone, in the cold, perfecting every movement my legs made. Making everything faster. More efficient. More powerful. The soft roughness of track at your fingertips. Thighs conditioned and flexed to be spring loaded. Then the starter’s gun, and that first burst. Running spikes absorbing into the lane, knees like pistons, whirl up slam down, whirl up slam down. Then the final dip for victory or desperation. Months, even years of work for a single moment. I think about this as I watch people live out the lives they planned. As people appear and disappear. Things change. I haul myself up into my wheelchair and roll away.