Effervescent/Evanescent

• Susannah Gordon, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2011

Once there was a little girl who told everyone she met (and she met everyone) that when she ‘grew up’ she would be an actress, and the sweet implication in every ‘grown up’s voice was
“oh, how precious, her dreams aren’t dead yet”
and the emphasis was always on yet but they didn’t know and she didn’t understand so it hurt no one (yet).

A little boy she’d played with once built model aeroplanes (just like the real ones) in his bedroom and his mother slept alone on the couch and he didn’t really notice or understand but he wanted to
fly,
fly,
fly away
and he read "Where the Wild Things Are" while cleaning his room ten years later and remembered feeling that he was Max without the courage or strength of will and he’d always just wanted to be somewhere else (grow up).

When I was 13 my class was asked to build a project around the question ‘who am I?’ - one far beyond the reach of children (humans) and I compiled a collection of anecdotes, photographs, sentiments, claiming my friends throughout the ages had defined me and on reflection the following years were inevitable for she who defines herself through others is but a shadow and a shadow is what I was.

Dawn watches the shadow of its own finger tips tracing its skin, the horizon a pinched pink (red sky in the morning), space of an absent mind, absent thought in absentia in amnesia and small talk. Nothing is ever quiet. Pre-birth and death are our only quiet, and then the quiet only belongs to our own forms, not the rest of the indifferent world (warning). Even the silence of death is an illusion brought on by the ego.

“What do you hear?”
“Nothing. You.”
“I did not ask who you heard. I asked what you can hear”
“I hear nothing but our voices”
“You are arrogant.”
“Only the arrogant can accuse others of arrogance”
“Do not jump to your own defence, that is the road to narcissism. Identify and understand your arrogance. I am merely stating facts. What is the basis of this fact?”
“I don’t know. I can’t hear anything, though. This is the most peaceful place I’ve ever been.”
“That’s better, but peace and silence are very different concepts. Think. Listen. Hear. Step outside of yourself, as if you were a performer, analysing your own movements and words in order to enhance your act and escape anxiety. See yourself as a persona”
“What do you hear?”
“Everything. Movement. Life. Dirt. Wind. Everything that is more than we are.”

It’s the difference in definitions, the entirely separate vocabularies of terms, thoughts, words, the connotations of a life time weighing down every sentence. Nothing is quiet. Every uncomfortable silence in conversation is created by an unknown sense, an advanced empathy, the knowledge of the unsaid and the half communication between minds – the unheard impressing itself upon us.
Can you hear it?
Can you?