Fragment 0.03

So what, so what, we all were all afraid.
So this I swear I know, it's not the chemicals.
You are off my mind I finally got away.
You said it's such a life to remember,
So come on, and we'll sleep away December.

 

It was you, bringing your white company.
Bringing the night so it seemed.
And we will never sleep again.
So as you walk through the door,
And yell I'm never coming back here.
It's over we are still nothing.

"December" by Lydia

 

Every so often, the compulsion bubbles to the surface without warning. As time passes, so do the intervals in between. It remains unclear whether there are exacting conditions or settings that must be met, like the night-blooming cereus that unfurls only a single night in the year. Sometimes, it creeps up in the early hours before sunrise, when the only sound is the stereo within muted car windows. Other times, it strikes like a lightning bolt, violent and blinding, leaving you reeling and unkeeled.

Time has been kind to Freya. The faintest edges of fibrosis betray her scars, traceable only with a discerning touch. But this tranquility that comes with age owes much to the callused layer that cocoons the amber of her former self. Where she used to feel the crests and troughs, now there is stillwater. Where there were once bursts of crimson and vermilion and violet and every vibrant hue in between, the color palette has faded to shades of gray.

 

There is the obsession. The intrusive thought. The only way to break is the compulsion.

 

And so, Freya picks up the metaphorical razor. She has her set of blades. You will have your own personal collection. The songs that transport you to that exact memory, that particular moment. For Freya, the purpose of the incision is not to hurt, but to feel. just for an hour, just for a night... slice the cocoon, shatter the amber, let me bleed, hurtle me back to the rustling green leaves, the yellow frisbee on the white beach, back when my highs and lows moved like the tides following your gravitational pull, when my emotions burned like a supernova and collapsed like a dying star, when i told you i wanted to never feel like this again but maybe this was the most alive i ever was and will ever be.

 

When it's over, Freya holds compression until the blood coagulates. The skin will close, the tissue will granulate, and in time, the cocoon and the callus will smooth over once more.

 

Fragment .04

Freya. Frida. What's in a name?

It's not the first time it's happened, she muses wryly. Much to her surprise, she is far less upset than she would have expected. Oh, she'll admit it's pathetic -- that he effectively butchered her name, demoting her from Norse Goddess to Spanish painter. She is still wondering how the hell Lennox managed to forget her name. There was a time when he would look her in the eye and address her by name. Freya. Freya, are you coming with us? Perhaps his memory really is as terrible as they say. Or perhaps she really is that forgettable.

Freya. Frida. What's in a name? As long as she exists in his world, she will be content to bide her time. That which we call Freya by any other name would wait just as patiently until the world spun off its axis.

Fragment .03

This was the last place Freya thought she would find it.

There was that one time. Freya sat on the bus in the drop-off circle. After a few minutes of waiting, the bus driver ignited the engine and the bus began to move. But as the bus driver circled towards the exit, he detected a couple of students who had just reached bus stop just moments after he had driven off. "Sorry, guys. I'm going to circle back around and pick up those folks." He pulled the bus back into the drop-off circle and saved the students from waiting another ten minutes for the next bus to arrive. "It's like what they say," he said. "You can't withdraw if you don't deposit. What goes around comes around."

There was that other time, when the chatter of the dining hall was silenced in an instant by the clatter of a plate and dinnerware to the floor. The culprit stood motionless for what seemed like hours, horrified and embarrassed by what had happened. Freya turned to O, about to ask her if they should help the girl out, when without word, Lennox rose from his seat and bent down to the ground before the girl, sweeping the spilled food onto the fallen plate with the strewn fork. His silent act thawed the ice; others began rising from their seats to help clear the mess from the floor. Later, as Lennox returned to his seat across the table from Freya, K remarked, "I admire that, Prince Charming. Getting up to help the damsel in distress." Lennox shrugged as he sank his fork into the bowl of pasta. "She would have just stood there if somebody hadn't move first."

It's easy to forget just how small this world is. An article in the Boston Globe shared how a couple in France found a message in a bottle that a couple in Massachusetts had thrown into the sea many years ago. When they tried contacting the woman who had written the message, they were grieved to learn that the woman had died just last year. They had never met, and yet now, a death still left an impact, still meant something to someone's life.

Education in college is less about academia than about growing as a person. That's what she's beginning to find.

Fragment .02

"So it was four or five of everything, as you are no good.
I saw it through the frame and through my face.
Covering my eyes, because we are nothing,
and never quite the same from a black and white summer.
With photographs that showed our rails and razorblades.
I think it cured my pain, again.

Promise you will go down my neck.
Just like those pills and your cigarette."

-- "December" by Lydia

Only a single photograph sits on her desk. A reminder of her single biggest regret. She doesn't look at it much anymore, save when she awakes in the morning to discover that it has fallen off the corner of her desk again during the night.

Until now, Freya drove blindfolded all her life, oblivious to the signs that flashed by in the margins of her life's story. The candy-coated metal of her life's vehicle was but an armor, keeping others out and shutting herself inside. It was her instrument of freedom, and yet it was her cage.

But the blindfold is gone now. Ripped off of her face, she is blinded yet again -- not from darkness, but from light. The signs are everywhere. The conveniently vacant seat on the bus, for instance. She knows what she could have -- should have -- done. But she followed her gut reaction instead and recoiled from the opportunity in the opposite direction.

She's heard the terms thrown around in her psychology class. Cognition. Conditioning. Stimulus. A rat is conditioned by an electric shock to avoid sitting on the platform. Birds learn to avoid the deliciously beautifully yet bitterly poisonous butterflies. Freya almost expects to find her own picture in the pages of her textbook.

"Human girl is conditioned to respond fearfully to deceptively handsome faces, in fear of reliving the memory of her photographs again."

Fragment .01

Freya hasn't dreamt much since she's been Here.

Her bedside is perched by the window. There's not much of a view during the day, save the waxed green fanning of the magnolia tree and the occasional bird that flits from branch to branch. But there is something soothing about the night, when the row of glowing windows fade one by one, like rectangular shooting stars being swallowed by the dark.

You could spend days and nights memorizing the angles and lines of a person's face in a dozen photographs and yet never truly see the person. For some people, it's the eyes or the hands that becomes the imprinted ID to connect a name and a face. Yes, she had the deepest and warmest almond eyes -- or, he had the most elegant fingers and yet the most promising handshake.

For Freya, it has always been the voice. She never truly met a person until she heard her name spoken from his lips. She thought about her inglorious encounter with Lennox for the briefest second and then drowsed off to sleep with her copy of Antigone in hand.

That night she dreamt. She can't remember what she dreamt of anymore. All she knows is that when she woke up this morning, she was still crying.