[this was my final project for ap english lit. i am posting it here because i've been away from the chronicles for long enough that i really need to easy myself back into it. you will notice that i have violated my normal standard of capitalization (or lack thereof) due to the fact that this was indeed graded. yes, yes, i am a sell-out. isn't it beautiful?]
The dandelions went to seed today
at last. I never liked their yellow heads
beside my path, exploding on my way.
Those cheerful blossoms beckoned me to stay.
To stray and distance from the track I tread
and live my life away. Reality
had sprung up in the dandelions’ stead.
I picked one, and he sweetly, slowly bled.
He shed a sugared tear for those like me
who live in fear. It ran across my hand.
I slowly posed to set the seedlings free
and wish for life. It was not to be.
As I’d commit the seedlings to the land,
one day I will too be only sand.
Once upon a time, there was a girl crawling through the woods. She was not lost; she was going somewhere. The woods were dim: not dark, but simply lacking in light. There was no peaceful, ethereal greenish glow enveloping the girl, clad in a tattered black tunic, as she watched her destination in the tunnel vision of her mind’s eye. She groped onwards, blindly following that evanescent vision, placing one hand, then one knee, in front of the other with the methodical regularity of routine. To one with such deliberate and monotonous paces, these trees all looked the same. They were merely a means to an end, her end.
As she crawled in a razor-straight line, she passed a bush. It was a rather nondescript bush, like a plastic shrub taken from a movie set. Perhaps it was too perfect. A few dozen measured paces later, the bush brushed her shoulder again. And again, and again. And again, like a skipping record. Finally, the padding of her hands and knees in the damp soil stopped. It was no wonder that these trees all looked the same.
The lid closed on her mind’s eye as she stroked the plastic leaves of the bush and raised her face toward the pinnacles of the majestic trunks. Up there, in an atmosphere more real than her mysterious end, these trees all looked uniquely alive. Give up, the foliage whispered. Don’t lose yourself for that vision; it is merely a figment of your imagination. Live with your eyes open. She rose to her feet, spinning around and unconsciously abandoning her direction. Give it up and live! Still clutching a fistful of plastic leaves, she ran desperately through the dim forest. She ran for nothing; she ran for her life. But, as she left her tunnel vision behind, the absence of light became less noticeable and the humbling, regal trunks less dense. Her bare feet passed a dandelion in the soil, echoing the whispers of the neighboring flora.
A few dozen unmeasured bounds later, the trunks came to their end. Her open eyes fell upon a field of violently, gloriously yellow blossoms. It smelled sweeter than eternal summer and extended to the horizon under the carelessly blue sky. This is what it smells like to give up, the dandelions shouted. Aren’t you glad you’re living with your eyes open? Isn’t it beautiful?
- – -
Once upon a time, there was a little girl who was lost in the woods. They weren’t dark woods, just dull. They looked like any old woods. The trees were green and leafy. It was springtime, so there were blossoms on the shrubs. I suppose, for a nature-lover with a camera, they would have been very attractive woods. The new leaves cast a greenish hue on the air, which was cool and peaceful.
The little girl wore a red cape, but that is of no importance. She carried a bundle of papers, with ticked boxes, scribbled paragraphs, and signatures. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. There was undoubtedly a meaning to these papers, a purpose. But she’d be darned if she knew what it was. It was a heavyish stack of papers, and she rather wished she had a backpack or something in which to put them, because her arms were getting sore. And she walked, in a straight path through the woods. Not being a nature aficionado, to her, every tree looked alike. She kept her path by noting the flowers on the bushes – pretty flowers, of every color – as she went.
The trees began to thin, and she eventually came to a clearing. If a bird had looked down upon the clearing while flying over, he would’ve noticed that it was shaped most perfectly like a phoenix. That, also, is of no importance. In the middle of the clearing, there was a patch of dandelions. These were peculiar dandelions, in that they had not gone to the trouble of populating the whole of the clearing, but just kept to their sunny little mound in the center. There were seven of them and, unsurprisingly, that is of as much importance as the girl’s garb and the shape of the clearing.
She approached the mound at seated herself next to it, putting down her papers. The wind toyed with the papers, scattering them narrowly. In the end, the girl thought, we are all playthings of the wind. We are blown from one place to another, unsure of where we will go next. She sighed, and picked a dandelion. This particular dandelion had gone to seed; that is to say, while its brothers flaunted yellow petals, this one was marked with the white fuzz of age. She breathed in deeply, and committed the seeds to the wandering, playful wind. Indeed, we are all playthings of the wind. One tenacious seed remained stubbornly stuck to the stem of the dandelion. She picked it off, and set it free. She licked the broken stem of the dandelion, but his sap was bitter, tasting not like a fantasy but like life.
The wind played with the clouds overhead. One cloud took the shape of a dragon, she noted as she reclined into the seductively, offensively green grass. The dragon was only a dragon as long as her imagination let it remain a dragon. Once she fancied it was a horse, it became a horse, in all its rearing, whinnying majesty. Shutting her eyes, she imagined herself as a cloud, riding the horse, riding on the wind, into the sunset.
Perhaps that was where she was going, the sunset. It made no sense that the sunset would want these papers, riddled with flawed marks and useless words, but maybe the sun was fueled by paperwork and bureaucracy instead of hydrogen and deuterium. That would explain why it was so very bright above her school, and so very dim in the woods, where little paperwork was to be found. Perhaps that was why the center of her clearing – for it was not just a clearing now, it was her clearing – glowed so very brightly as the wind fidgeted. The wind explored the folds of her cape, invading her thoughts and dissipating her horse.
In a few moments, the wind would make her disappear, too. Because we are all playthings of the wind, like the clouds, and we only exist as long as we imagine we exist. We are all, in our essence, figments of our own imaginations. There was nothing left in the clearing but scattered papers and a dandelion stem, as the wind blew away the figment of one person’s imagination to make room for the next.
This pillow breaks your every painful fall
from grace and from such other dizzy heights.
Imagination knows no paths or walls.
On days you know you haven’t done it all
and days you know you haven’t done it right,
this pillow breaks your every painful fall.
Its purpose is to capture and enthrall,
to drench a hurting world in blinding light.
Imagination knows no paths or walls.
Sometimes you feel your back against the wall,
too deep inside a neverending night.
This pillow breaks your every painful fall.
Imagination lifts up those who crawl
and treasures those who always lose the fight.
Imagination knows no paths or walls.
Imagination nation welcomes all:
“Embrace the vision in your mental sight!
This pillow breaks your every painful fall!
Imagination knows no paths or walls!”
- – -
Once upon a time, there was a girl running through midsummer woods. The foliage cooled the earth below, and the girl ran barefoot. She wore a sundress that boasted every color of summer, from the magenta of the azaleas to the green of the cornfields to the blue of the hot, sunny sky. She ran as if her energy would never run out, as if she survived by photosynthesis like the trees around her. Her breakneck pace also suggested an abject terror of whatever compelled her to run, but it was so very out-of-place in the serenity of the forest. The armful of papers to which she clung was heavier than its size suggested, pulled down by the weight of the words printed upon each page. These were words so vivid as to make the girl’s lively sundress look gray, words so passionate as to make the sunny sky feel cold, words so luminous as to make the girl run like her burden was the beginning and end of the world. These words were weighty words.
Her flight through the forest was interrupted by a flash. Red, she thought as it spread across her dress, that’s the color this dress was missing. As she fell, the weighty words remained branded into her mind. Ideas can change the world. They beat louder than her failing heart. Ideas can change the world. ba-BUMP ba-BUMP ba-BUMP. Ideas can change the world. Ideas can change the world.
The weighty words fell out of her paper burden, shining and silver, crashing to the ground. IDEAS! jarred the girl’s head. CAN CHANGE! jarred her right hand. THE WORLD! jarred her heart and, in fact, the whole of her being. These shocks made the surrounding earth tremble, felling every nearby tree to form a clearing which, to the disgruntled sparrows circling overhead, most strongly resembled a phoenix. Where the girl in the lively sundress had fallen was nothing but a grassy mound with seven blissfully yellow dandelions growing upon it, surrounded by the shining silver worlds: Ideas Can Change the World.
For ideas
we sing and cry,
for ideas
cannot be put in chains.
In ideas
we live our lives.
In our lives
we strive to make a change.
Our ideas
can block their knives;
our ideas
can withstand leaden rain.
For ideas
we live and die,
for ideas
are all that will remain.
