Greenlinde

"I feel lost."

"I know you do, but I'll fix it. Ok?"

"It's like when you're little and you get lost in a busy supermarket..."

"I'll find you. I promise babe."

"Why'd you lose me in the first place?"

"What?"

Have you ever noticed how different buildings look upside-down? How your perception is deceptively reconfigured by your line of sight?

The trees drip from the sky. Flags fly below half-mast. People climb out of doors and walk on air. 

The campus lawn is illuminated electric with spotlights, as if waiting for dancers. Sometimes I see her out here, sometimes I don't. 

I sit upright and everything returns to normal again.

It's cold. 

I mean, I know it's only fall here. My first real fall, with leaves that change colors and die in the most elegant spiraling way. But, even though it's only fall here.. 

It's cold.

Maybe not for everyone else, walking around in tee shirts and jeans. 

I was late getting to campus.

My roommate had pushed both beds together as his own and I don't understand how he could have slept like that, always slipping between the crack.

"So where are you from?" He has a southern drawl. I told him Europe and his eyes lit up. I could already hear all of his questions and the space between my eyes began to ache.

As he questioned me and I moved my bed to its proper spot, he rubbed the small of his back. We had similar ailments, just not for the same reasons.

I had questions for him but I didn't ask them. I seemed to be invading on something he had come to be familiar with.

I called home but no one picked up on the other end.

Everyone is freaking out because it's homecoming weekend and the Bulldogs are playing but I don't know who. Not that I really care either. Bodies rush past my door in a blur of blue and green--our team's colors. A face materializes at the frame of the door.

"Todd, are you coming? You're gonna be late."

I don't know who this person is.

"In a minute."

"Okay," he says, slapping the door with his palm before sliding into the fray.

I put a sweatshirt on--the away team's, I think--and step into the rush.

All I want to do is to be a writer. Are my lungs good enough to sustain that career? I feel better making paper cranes for people who cannot have hearts big enough to fit their chests. They swell and the wind sometimes takes me by surprise. Everyone knows that there is nothing that I am really good at. Through the years, I've discarded the pages of notebooks that I treasured as though they were clothes and there were ravenous purposes left in bedrooms. You know, it's strange. Not many people realize that human beings are great harbourers of scars. We walk around as though we were settled deep in some kind of philosophical tussle with Kant or Aquinas, but we are nothing but liquid and moving brains. We are very few and far between. Underneath all our lies and baby clothes, we are set in the uncertain heel of a woman crossing the road. She doesn't dance on the life painted in the middle of the street. 

You can see the stars in central Pennsylvania. Unlike the suburb just outside of Kansas City that raised me, it’s possible here to look up into that vast abyss of white fiery masses and spot the constellations we can only read about back in the Midwest. 

There, too many streetlights litter our roads, and downtown’s Power and Light district reaches across the twenty-minute drive to my neighborhood, making viewing this age-old vision an impossible task. But I still tried. 

Returning at three AM from a P&L bar, I stood in the middle of the dead end I live by and looked straight up. There was nothing in the sky for me that night, but turning back to the ground that city confined me to, I saw brighter stars than they’ve got here--headlights, the driver showing no sign of pausing to consider their blinding stars’ effect on that not-completely-sober version of me. 

This post is about letting you writers out there know that you can submit to Greenlinde and let your work be read by others. Tired of rejection? I know I am (and with the ladies…), so, tell us your story. 

Just follow the rules detailed after you click ‘Submit’ on Greenlinde’s homepage and there should be no problem!

Spread the word! Reblog this to let the writers know that we will not reject them!

2:30AM and the phone was buzzing like a hive of nails. I brushed some dreams off my eyes, strained my retinas to focus on the screen, and made out the name. As much as I would've loved to ignore the call, or continue to pretend studying like I can actually learn Latin, I had to answer; it was the only girl I've ever loved, and still do. She was sobbing hard and everything she was saying sounded like vague oblongs resembling words over the tiny receiver.

"What's wrong? Why're you crying, baby?" I asked.

"I think I'm about to have a panic attack."

"What?"

"I think I'm going to have a panic attack."

"What's wrong?"

"I'm so scared. After my grandma, and all these things were talking about in my philosophy classes, all I can think about is death. What happens when we die? How do we know?" She sounded so desperate--a wounded orb of light sifting through dark madness trying to see what eyes were never meant for.

"Even if we could touch Heaven with our own hands, I don't think anyone would ever believe it--it's that good. So, we never really know in the way a scientist might know why flowers wait until spring, or that are bodies are full of cells. We believe because we'll never understand a place that's meant for our souls through our body anyway. We don't die for death, love."

The next morning the sky was gray and limp like a sagging curtain. But I had a text message: "Thank you for last night, honey." I smiled. If the clouds looked like death, they were only going somewhere better.

It was misting, the winds slowly picking up for a downpour. Jonathan and I were sitting on a bench near the pond behind the cafeteria and Osterman, watching the water ripple by the soccer field’s light. I was holding his hand, which was shielded underneath the arm of his hoodie.

“Hey”, he said with this bit of gruff from the lack of talking. I looked at him and I just remember he had this mischievous shine in his eyes. He told me later that, if anything, the shine was all the nerves burning inside him. He took the headphones from around his neck and placed them gently on my ears. I giggled as the song drowned the weekend noises out. The song started slow, distorted. Not a slow song necessarily, but calm. An electronic beat pulsed in and out as he released my hand slowly. I felt the slow draw of his hand against the back of my neck. I jumped, but I wish my body hadn’t. His eyes were making circles on me, his foot swaying to the beat of the song he couldn’t hear. He knew it by heart though, even through my ears. And, in a strange way, I knew it too. The rain picked up as the song started swelling and I knew he wanted to kiss me by the chorus. He gave me the soundtrack so I could complete the scene. It was in that moment, after a week and a half of knowing Jonathan, that I fell for him.

I'm somewhere. Wisconsin girl; I tell her I'm from New York. I don't know why really, I just do. She says she's jealous. I say it's no big deal really. I ask here where she goes to school; she says at a Tech College nearby but it's nothing compared to New York. Like a stomach punch her words hit me: she's jealous of a lie.

He stands in the shower and lets the water get hot enough to turn the skin on his chest red before getting out and looking at himself in the mirror.

Someone passes him and says hello but he doesn't answer, lost in his thoughts. Lost in the crowd. They frown when they leave his eyes. He wonders if he was mistaken for someone else and both are lost in a missed communication.

I had an interview for an internship this morning. The man behind the desk kept squinting at me between glances at my resume.

His secretary gave me a cup of coffee and we cracked jokes about working in an office setting until the man behind the desk was ready. As I walked through the door, she winked at me and picked up the phone, chewing her gum loudly and re-crossing her legs the other way.

I have never worked in an office before. It was just easier to laugh along with her, and fake it, than deny conversation. Some people are just easy to please.

I was sitting in my dorm room, studying for Psychology 215: Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way; which, to say the least, I do not understand at all. I was more or less flipping through the pages in the large book, looking for photographs when my telephone rang. I didn't want to answer it so I let the machine pick it up.

"Hey, Van--uh it's me. Your father. Mitchell. At any rate--Stop, I'm calling my daughter. Will you please--let go! Vanessa, uh, yeah I'm leaving this message to say that I've been thinking about you and we haven't talked since the last time and really I guess most of that's my fault--give me five minutes! Most of that is my fault but LA calls honey, it really does. It calls and says, 'Ayy, Mitch, it's about time you pay up for your daughter's tuition and room and board and umm, while you're at it can you write a check for your estranged ex-wife's alimony? Thanks, Mitch. We really appreciate it.' So that's what I'm doing honey okay? But yeah--I've--I love you."

Click.