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HeartOfAServant
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Name: Kristen
Country: United States
State: Texas
Gender: Female
Interests: Travelling, spreading God's love, or both at the same time. :-D
Expertise: I'm nothing without Christ.
Message: message me
AIM:  LilsoundGirl
Member Since:
2/13/2004
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| Freewriting Levi in Little India
What do I see? I’m new in this place. It’s a bustling marketplace. I don’t know the language on the signs. The smells are subtle, but overpowering in their unfamiliarity. The colorful fabrics are strung up on hangers. The dark-skinned women glow from underneath their saris.
Singapore- The world stuck on an island.
A day in Little India
A young caucasian twenty-something stood leaning against the blue-painted stucco of the street corner. The blue was an intense shade, the shade of blue that captures the eye and whispers familiar words of different days, something familiar enough to be recognized, but not familiar enough to be remembered. It was that favorite crayon in the box, cerulean, that filled the pages with scribbles resembling underwater dreamworlds and outerspace fantasies. That shade of blue. The sun gave way to a film of muddled clouds. The building darkened in the shadow and the boy became the striking feature of the dulled street corner. He had hair the color of nothing in particular, and eyes of the same nature. His clothes were insignificant, the uniform of a traveller, comfortable well-worn cargo pants and a muddled burgundy sweater. In any number of street corners he would blend into the wall, but it was his frozen stare that made him the momentary monument of the street, a fleeting moment that would soon pass with the clouds.
Levi was an escapist. He couldn’t stand to be in one place long enough for it to permanently get ahold of him. This may be traced back to his childhood. Every friend he had ever made as a child turned out to be temporary The days he spent wishing he had a playmate outnumbered the days he spent playing with a newfound one. Levi didn’t think about this too much. It could possibly even be blamed on his lazy affinity for new hobbies. Each time he picked up a hobby, he found that he was instantly good at it, not great, but good enough to have a notieceable raw talent that if honed would reveal him to be a genius. This was true for all sorts of things from sports, to music, to painting, even to cattle-roping. He didn’t have the drive to commit himself to anything. This could very well be a typical male conundrum, commitment issues. But Levi was not afraid of commitment, he just refused to commit to anything. He wasn’t sure why, Neither was anyone else, although several guesses have been made by a number of jaded females.
Yesterday, Levi found himself in Singapore.
My Snapshots of India
Mustafa supermarket. Saris dangling in the air. Endless shades and patters waving in the open air structure. The balconies overlooking a food market. The air so jumbled in flavors that the nose quivered in fear of exhaustion. The heat of the day warming the fruit, spoiling it.
The women sitting in the doorways fanning themselves and grabbing the wrists of their children that tripped up their customers. Walls of shining silver and gold bangles of all sizes.
The fat-set woman who grasped my wrist to mentally measure my knuckles to fit the bangle. Picking the color sets of 12 bangles.
Eating off a street vendor. Ordering something by the picture, pointing and pretending to understand the questions. Tenderly tasting the brightest colored food imaginable. Crying involuntarily due to the intense spice of the food. Thankful that chicken is the same in all countries, just buried beyond foreign sauces.
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Great clouds lumbered overhead with great thundering force. Twenty-five identical clay-tiled rooftops divvied up the land like poker chips on a green felt table. One wouldn’t guess it by glancing at the small town, but a bet had been made. The stakes were high.
The heat of the day was crippling. Shallow breaths were traded between sluggish eyelids closing and dragging open again. The glass bottle dripped with sweat, it’s surface etched and darkened with reuse. The boy reclined in the couch. He was alone in the house, yet every window was open and the heat pulsated through the air. No, the windows weren’t open; they were broken. The floor crunched and an orange cat slinked to the fireplace and sat on the cool brick.
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| Freewrite for 10 minutes
Beginning time: 2:20 PM
Writing unleashing any words. Turn on that bathroom faucet, turn the handle, the rusty green limescale encrusted handle. Keep turning it. The water spurts orange and stains the dull white sink. Water drips from the handle. Why is it that plumbing is never perfect? There is always a problem lurking somewhere in the plumbing. These rusty handles were inevitable, there is no perfect plumbing. The new stainless steel sink basin we bought for the kitchen a few weeks ago is stained. But that was my fault. I had no idea there was a difference between drain cleaner and sulfuric acid. So I picked up the wrong bottle, in my defense it said it was drain cleaner. Apparently this kind of drain cleaner will stain even a stainless steel sink. Typical. It’s always the things that can’t go wrong that will go wrong. The orange streaks are fading to a calm pink color. The water has cleared up. I don’t even want to know what builds up in those pipes. Another five minutes and I’ll have forgotten that the water came from a mysterious putrid source and I’ll drink out of it. I have these moments when I remember that I forget things, and that scares me. I forget great details about things, I can’t even tell people much detail about stories I’ve read. Once they are not before my eyes, they are no longer at my mind’s command. It’s not a big deal until I remember that I’ve forgotten. That is the scary part…like these pipes. They are always rusted and dingy, but it’s not a big deal until that one moment the faucet is reawakened after a few days sabbatical. It makes me wonder how many things are like that in my life, present but invisible. The best and worst things are like that. The deepest love I’ve ever felt for someone was completely unapparent to me until he was gone. I don’t know if that is one of the good things, or one of the bad. I never really know, I’ll forget about it in five minutes anyways. I turn off the faucet and walk out of the room, flicking off the light.
End Time: 2:30pm
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| I decided to get some writing done at the library, the perfect place to be alone in public. It has just enough noise to keep my mind from wandering into far away worlds, but is free of the jarring hubbub of normal public areas. Or at least that’s how a library is supposed to be, that is, until I entered it.
I sat down at one of those study tables tucked between the shelves. The stacks absorb the sounds around the library fairly well. I began to unload my giant laptop bag of its contents: a bottle of caffeine, candy bar, the book review pages, my trusty Flannery O’Connor, three manuscripts I’m editing, my ipod, phone set to vibrate.
As I’m sitting in the rickety wooden chair, digging in my bag for who-knows-what-else, I find myself in a state of vertigo and panic. Yes, I’m going down. Surely I can catch myself. Nope. And the chair is coming with me. My bottom cushions the fall soundlessly. But that rickety chair bangs to the floor, shaking one of the stacks.
I tip the chair back up and slide into it, hoping that the 8 foot tall stacks have kept me anonymous. I glance around to see a woman peeking through a gap in the books, asking me if I’m alright. I blurt out, “yeah I just tipped over”.
What I wanted to do was rush out of the library, but packing all my junk away would have made more of a disruption to that once sacred air in the stacks. Instead I sit there with a red ink stain on one sleeve, a coffee blotch on the other, and a face that is blushing behind the case of rosacia I somehow developed the past week.
Pleading with fate to let me melt away into the unnoticed library commotion, my phone sings out that a telemarketer wants my attention.
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