Thursday, October 1, 2015

September 29, 2007

Cirrus clouds stationed overhead as Lena Glassburn thought about the grass. Each blade, bending and dancing independently. There were hundreds of these spirits in the area just beyond her toes- thousands, tens of thousands, millions surrounding her at every side. Every one peddling its own significance and irrelevance, unseen by anyone but her and the insects. She sat folded with her knees bent inches from her shoulders; hands clasped, fingers intertwined from the right thumb down, suspending this position indefinitely, as her still-delicate frame allowed. Lena was often romantic about the early morning. The air was fresh and free from the pollutants of life’s growing responsibilities. A fragile wind, endowed with perfumes of late summer dew and cold asphalt, caused her skin to bubble in instinctual defense. Tolleston Hill was where she could be alone just before sunrise.

The deepest blues were straight above her. Lena broke her staring contest with the earth and formed a clean ninety-degrees from the celestial navy blues haunting over her shoulder. From this peak, there was no higher place within view. This, as it had crossed her mind in weeks past, made her the tallest creature in the world. Lena needed the loneliness more than she knew. Each year that passed, the world became a smaller place. There was a time when the hill was a mountain. She needed permission to scale such a summit. Upon completion of her task, Lena would always celebrate as if she had just scaled Mount Everest. At nineteen years of age, she understood the hill was minuscule in comparison to any great peak around the world. Age had waned her sense of wonder and accomplishment. The vivid imagination she had prized was not as powerful. In its place was insecurity, anxiety and an attention to detail that often left her wondering a worst case scenario in every situation. Catherine Evalena Glassburn, born the eighth day of August, nineteen eighty-eight, had become a full-on adult, indebted to everything that comes with the territory- bills, diet, friendships, crippling pressure from family to fall in love before she was even legally capable of buying a beer. It was a normal life- a patchwork of moments yielding unrivaled joy and impermeable sorrow. Every year that came seemed to pull the extremes of these further from the center. Lena found that station in the static of a late September dawn. There, she was alone and blank and capable.

Time moved much more quickly now. Moments seemed to break and dither as fast as they assembled. In her youth, Lena and her mother would walk around their neighbourhood. The sidewalks stretched on endlessly, surely circumventing the globe. These walks were expeditions. By now, she had mastered the routes so well as to realize it was far less than two miles in total, but in her early years, all of the new sights and smells and excitement made it on par with the works of Homer. Back then, a walk around the block took hours, or so she thought. All of the fascinating details could dance around her brain in a pace that she could understand, but seldom retain. As her legs lengthened and thoughts meandered away from just what was before her eyes, that same distance was never long enough. That was when Lena started coming to Tolleston Hill before school.

Her part of town was still safe enough to warrant a teenage girl to walk on her own in the pre-dawn blackness. Of course, humans her age always tend to think of themselves as invincible, but her ingrained over-cautiousness would never allow even the tiniest of movement in the shadows go unnoticed. Phoenix, Indiana, was the home she had always known. Within the boundaries of the town, she made and lost friends, kept and told secrets, and learned how to pedal a bicycle. What was odd, she eventually thought, was how there really was no limitation to how far she could travel. There was no wall invisible holding her to the edge of town, and no manner with which to believe the world ended at the old mills just past Iddings Avenue. Yet Lena was raised to not wander past that point. It was a safety mechanism from her parents to prevent a high-percentage of horrifying and newsworthy things from happening to her. A few years back, inward reckless abandon had caused dreams of riding her bike to Indianapolis, which never seemed to far in a proper motorized vehicle, but on a human-powered form of transportation, could be cause for an adventure much like the ones she had developed walking around her neighbourhood at a younger age. Before Lena had pushed one pedal forward toward the capitol, her newfound wanderlust had spread from a matchstick to a wildfire. Perhaps she could ride to Chicago or Milwaukee or somewhere mysteriously west. There were thousands of places her feet had never stood. It was a reconciliation with her childhood wonder, but adulthood planted seeds of duty and obligation to matters in and around Phoenix.

Lena became an only child the day before her tenth birthday. Her older brother and idol, Bradley, had been sick for two weeks. His health had rapidly declined, and there seemed to be nothing that could even slow the degenerative process. At varying points in a day, he would fall into such severe coughing fits that sometimes a drop of blood would fall from his mouth. Bedrest only exacerbated his malady. By the time their parents had elevated their concern level from cold medicine and a vaporizer to an emergent trip to Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis, it was too late. Whatever had been eating away at Bradley had done its damage. The best pediatricians in the Western Hemisphere were unable to save him. On August seventh, nineteen-ninety eight, at the age of sixteen, Bradley Christoph Glassburn lost his battle, and Lena had her first experience with devastating loss. The tears did not come. She could not grasp fully what had happened. At his funeral, a moment of childlike innocence had boiled over. She saw him lying in the casket, and told her brother to wake up. The four days since Lena had last heard his voice was the longest such event in her life. She needed her brother, and she wanted him to get up. In the back of her mind, he would wake up, but her conscious would overstep that innocent thought. She knew he was gone. The numbness had dissipated into realization. She could never again make him laugh to the draw of tears by imitating a personality caricature of President Clinton. That was his favorite. No matter how many times a day she would perform the joke, Bradley always laughed. She missed his high-toned giggle and occasional snort. Lena finally broke. The tears came, and her inconsolable heart had hardened beyond recovery. Every year, her birthday brought back memories of him, most of which were from the days of their mutual youth when he was the hero and antagonist to so many of her pre-adolescent misadventures. Nine years since, either variety of Bradley-centered thoughts had diluted to fleeting glances. She was older now than he had ever been, but she knew he would be proud of her.

The sun was cresting over the eastern treeline, poking holes in the tallest caps of evergreens and the slowly-browning oaks. Perfect shades of honey and strawberry and royal faded upward gently into each other, though never blending into something less pure. The cloak of translucent dust at the horizon was reason alone to be awake at this time. A chilled breath in through her nose kept a stillness in herself and a silence on the hill. Within this yawning and stretching dawn, Lena knew she was the only creature appreciating the beauty of it all from her exact perspective. Her hometown, population somewhere north of twelve thousand, was just big enough to feel the slightest hint of anonymity. It was enough to escape from the clutches of redundant interaction, but also to hold place within a slowly swelling community- to belong as an individual within the human-propelled productivity machine that began at the base of Tolleston Hill.

Aging was bringing about a wealth of smudges and blurs to Lena’s memory. The days of sitting in her father’s shopping cart at the local grocery store, now long gone and replaced with a national chain, were fading as well. If she thought intensely enough, the smells of freshly watered produce could still be found, especially in this moment bereft of carbon emissions from the morning commute. Within view, just east of Broadway and four blocks north, the parking lot that was once a park sat vacant and useless. Small-suburban Indiana is always too ambitious for its own good. Sure, it was a place meant to be used for a row of modern office buildings, but the landscape had evolved so much over Lena’s nearly two decades of life in Phoenix. One of the strangest parts was how change could be so blunt and polarizing, but after a period of getting used to the new, the old faded at blistering speed. Soon, Lena could not recall the name of that old grocery store, or the colors of the merry-go-round at the center of the park. But in those flashes of detail that still remained, she clung to more important things like games she played or which friends were present at the time. Those were the memories that counted for something. Years from now, Lena will be still be able to summon the names and faces and tendencies of the people that come and gone in her life. That was the secret. As long as she could remember someone, they were never really gone. So at the age of fifteen, she picked up the habit of writing down memories of her childhood whenever they jolted back into her conscious mind. The ones of her brother or grandfather were special. The leaflets of paper she scribbled the thoughts upon had collected into a shoe box.

With the sun having completely breached the edge of the known world, light enveloped every part of Phoenix. The reflections of light darted out in each direction from the thousands of glass panels that peppered the downtown area. Even the shadows were bright enough to view whatever mice or raccoons or other vampiric creatures that were left from the animal night shift. The moment was ending. Soon, Lena would have to take in the day’s accoutrements- work, school, family, friends, and every other form of detachment from herself. This was her time, however. A dalliance of peace and color within the monotony. Once the sun was at high noon, the colors she could see from the hill at dawn were long forgotten to the world. The air was never as pure and crisp and new as it was then. Daily she would sit there, as small as her body would allow, and be among the dancing blades of grass, the occasional bleat of some unseen bird, and the reflection of herself and who she was in a time when the world seemed much larger than it was becoming.