rockridge saves 3.11.08

At some point, the pulsating in her head had stopped. As her chucks bounced along the cracked pavement, her senses woke again; to the lacy ice of high clouds glazed across the cerulean above, winking crystalline between the skeletons of old oaks and leafless, willowy-looking trees. These shapes and these colors, under the sun, the all-quenching sun, reflecting inside her retinas, were what had powered her solitary journey before, and fueled the quest for beauty, and silently handed her the answers to her questions. There were always the questions. Always the thoughts, the reflections - one revelation after explosive sabotage, after another epiphany. One after another, each question boiled to the surface, a foul socratic mania, a dialectic process usually with each proposition uglier than the first. Why were the answers always so ugly? Why not focus on simpler questions, questions about form and composition, about space and balance? Instead, wonder; how could she leave this? How could her moods forsake these old streets, these houses slyly reminding her of a storied past, of gentrification and success and industrialization? It was like living in a computer graphics-fueled, technicolor version of a crinkly, sepia-tinted old film. How could she forget? How could she not care? How could anyone ask for more? How could the cracks in the sidewalk not be smiling? The air, still, but feeling more like the breath of a loved one across her face, hugged her with temperate arms. It was these temperate arms into which she needed to throw herself, soul and body, as an act of relief, which she could only achieve through walking. Seeing.