I believe in the fugue. Even though the fugue is not what I think it is. But most things aren’t what we think they are. That might be why they are things, but I digress into philosophy now and I fear to go there. My thoughts are coming to me, fast but jumbled, the best way to get them.
“Girls should be fearless.” I hear the voice but I ignore it again. Fear keeps us alive. I heard that somewhere too. When we cease to fear we die, even if only in metaphor. Not sure if I heard that anywhere.
“Girls should be fearless.” I laughed at the voice, and marveled how the voice was my own and had a brief thought of how I can ignore myself. But the thought tumbled away.
I love her in my way, this thoughtful part of me that speaks to me and whispers such promises. I should think about what to do, about the next step, but instead I think about the fragility of the misnamed fugue. Just a flow of thought that I love and hate and never am indifferent to.
I get here on my own, triggered by things that are beyond me yet are me. A song that suddenly catches my ear, a line from a poem that was found in a book I don’t remember opening, or even just a vision of something ordinary. Yes, usually that is it, the vision of something ordinary, in which for a moment you see the not so ordinary in it.
I marvel at the beauty. And the poetic fugue comes now and I get to be someone else. The girl I usually am disappears and becomes something less, yet something so much more.
“It is only a tree. Why do you stare so?” I whip around for the voice, but know even as I turn the voice is my own.
I wipe a tear from my face, not of sadness but of frustration, of the poet that comes and is chased away. (always chased away)
“Girls should be fearless.” I know the voice is my own, and I try to hold on to it, but I only see a tree now. The false fugue is gone, and I am no longer something more, something less. I am nothing at all.
And I leave my words at the tree, thought of but unsaid. Deeply considered but lost by the fear that keeps me alive, yet keeps me dead.
Oh, I hate to be so cryptic, and I wish I could write these words, but instead, they flash upon me so quickly and scatter. When trees become just trees, and a girl afraid to think too much becomes a girl that thinks not at all. Just another girl, laughing at the emptiness and afraid to look inside.
“Girls should -” I laugh and march in step down the hallway. Afraid and sadly comfortable. And the voice I needed to hear most is silent.
The original story title was “Girls Should Be Fearless.”
Rob is a transplanted Canadian, dropped down into the heart of Kansas and still wondering how that all happened. Put the pen to paper and start writing. He trusts the Muse to take him places but usually does not sit down long enough to listen very well. But he sees stories everywhere, because we are all amazing stories that need to be told.
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