Today, while I was still sleeping, the world woke up. I would say it happened gradually and with grace. I would compare it to a tired toddler peeping over the edge of the cot, or a swan emerging from a black lake. I would, only I wasn’t there to see it, and cawing hadidas at my window is anything but graceful.
Today was January 16th 2011, and today was a day in the life of an ordinary person. It was an ordinary day in the ordinary life of an ordinary girl. It started when I woke up with cell-phone alarm bell bees buzzing into my ears and stinging my dreams. Today I woke up blinking dusty eyelashes to push back a vision of the moon opening her mouth to swallow a fiery seraph and thinking that if today was a movie, the dream would mean something. It would be an ominous warning to ruin a regular morning , or a subconscious expression of my obscurely hidden emotions. But today it was just a dream.
Today wasn’t ‘a day in the life of a teenage archetype’ or ‘a day in the life of a cliché’. It was not a day of ‘I-know-what’s-going-to-happen-next’. Today was a day of finding sour milk in the fridge and drinking it anyway. It was a day to think ‘I’m starting Grade 10’ and not being traumatized when my parents didn’t care. It was a day to realize that in a matter of hours, it would be gone and then I would see it didn’t really mean anything anyway.
So today I climbed into my navy skirt fatigues and my bodyguard school shoes, and shivered with my bag of icy stationary on my back, because it smelt like potential and potential is so much more delicious than reality. I sat in the car with headphones on my ears and pretended I was silent, when really my head was drowning. I looked out the window as the landscape slipped up on concrete feet, and wished that my whole life came with background music, rather than just my morning car rides.
“How fare thee this morning?” my friend asked, her voice fizzing across a porous cell-phone line. “Why are you talking like that? Stop talking like that.” “I want to lie on pavements this weekend,” she answered, ignoring me. “That sounds funny,” I smiled, “phone me again later, I feel too much like the colour purple this morning.” “The colour purple?” she repeated incredulously, “what does that feel like?” “It feels like I’m hanging up on you now…”
And because it was a day in the real life of a teenage girl, it meant talking to people I didn’t know and asking everyone how they were when I didn’t really care. It meant smiling at things that sometimes weren’t funny, and laughing at things that wouldn’t have been funny in a movie. And I laughed at people that were funny without realizing it, because in real life, people laugh at that instead of pretending it’s par for the course.
Today I opened up a crisp notebook, and succumbed to the divine lure of a blank page. I grasped at half-revealed words and cursed at the shadows they threw on the wall. Today, when I wrote, I dug my fingers into my cheek, because only clichés bite their pencils and pencils don’t taste like inspiration to me. Today I sighed and smiled at the back-to-school reunions, and at the teachers scolding me for not paying attention. Today my thoughts ran away, but they left me behind. Today I wrote out a whole new life in my diary. Today I fell asleep in maths. Today I met a new teacher. Today I cleaned my desk. Today I ate lunch. Today school ended. Today-
Today turned into tonight, and after I waded through the oceans of white and navy to my chariot of rusted metal and squeaky fan-belts, I got home, and released my muscles into relaxed abandon, slashed away the puppet strings. I melted onto the couch and was abruptly held in stasis by the talking box in my lounge. Tonight it was cold, but I have to say that Jack danced around the house, stabbed grappling frosty fingers underneath the door and tried to scratch at my feet, because it sounds better. Tonight, I would say that the sky split apart as if God released his embrace on Heaven and started crying, but really it was nothing more glamorous than rain. Tonight, when I leant my cold cheek to a colder pillow, I tilted towards the sound of drops on my window, because it’s always been my lullaby. Tonight the Sandman snuck up on me, and released handfuls of dust over my head. Tonight was the closing circuit of an electric day.
And today wasn't an allegory or a metaphor. You won’t find any grapes of wisdom fallen from the prophet's mouth, nor secrets whispered in-between the perfect inky lines. There was nothing more to read than what was on the surface, because sometimes all we are is living and nothing else, and sometimes plot holes swallow us up. Sometimes real life flies past without mattering, and sometimes living it has no meaning. Sometimes real life is only real and nothing else, and sometimes the only thing with any gravity is just living and staying alive.
And sometimes… well, sometimes that's enough.
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