take my breath away

She liked quiet things.  The whisper of pages turning, the rustle of leaves, the tender broken sound of the fuzz of notebook paper being removed.  Those things made her stomach tickle and made her want to cry.  She could never understand why she felt this way, or what this feeling was.  One time, she asked a girl sitting next to her to listen.  The girl leaned in close, eyes wide, and watched as she ripped the frayed edges of the paper off.  It was an almost perfect rip too, along those perforated dots.  There was just one spot where it had actually torn into the paper, an indent of frayed fibers.  The girl smacked her gum, her waxed eyebrows raised, "You gonna tell me sum-thaan or wuh-at?"  She thought to herself, I just did. 

But that was the thing about thoughts...they weren't the words that came from her mouth.  Her thoughts were graceful, punctuated and grammatically correct.  But the line from there to her tongue was broken, the way her lips moved was never in line with the images in her head.  She wanted to scream, and scream loudly, and scream so the world could hear, and hear her speak beautifully, perfectly, precisely for once.  She didn't want to stammer, she didn't want the extra clacking of teeth to hold her down, or the fear of bending a lip the wrong way to stop her.  She wanted to climb out of that, reach up and grab the ledge of the cliff she was falling down and pull herself up. She wanted to lie down on the mossy ground and turn her head to the side and see that she was parallel to the horizon. 

But being parallel to the universe, she thought, would that make me just another line?  Somewhere in the caves of the cliff, somewhere in the river rushing below, somewhere in all of the cracks and crevices of rocks, voices chimed in and whispered, "If you are just another line, so is the horizon. So is the sunset. So is the earth itself."