The Girl on the Swing
Creative Non-Fiction Story
by
C. Oulens
A bed is a box is a sea is a seaful of sky is my bed.
Lying low. Curled on the bed. My pulse races on the meter…104…105…108. A brick rests beneath my head. A few twists and turns later, the brick softens its heart to goose down. With the one on my chest insistent on its existence, I detach the meter. Eyes shut. Pulse
racing. Down-down-downrightly-tightly-drowning.
Feeling. Trying to un-feel. Un-listening voices of the living and the dead. Tracing
peace. An eye inside my eyes. Seeing—
deprived of sight—dots of light. gathering greys—spilling bright. light silhouettes of grey amoebae. more dots—blots—un-blotting. non-shapes morphing into form constants: clouds… well… hills… vale… tunnels—the closest shape-names my mind blink-thinks. thing-like or like something. colliding—overlapping—swelling—perforating—collapsing—
like my thoughts: expansionist, reductionist.
I chase an almost-shape. It poofs. Another. Gone before I can count two. One stays a little longer. But fluid. I try to persuade it to leave a striking—or at least sensible—shape-impression on me: a three-legged chair, Garfield, pouting lips, a pair of stern eyes.
But every grey and every light I chase curdles—wordless—nonetheless. Evolves into some other utter undefinition: a noiseless flatulence of white noise or some useless meaninglessness.
My pulse is still racing—still tracing peace. I need to slow its pace or make it non-existent. I roll my eyeballs behind my weighty, flickering lids and try to fix them at the top.
Shots of light. A colour-drained straightish rainbow slowly bending into a Möbius strip of light & grey—unending without joining—at the top of my frame. I can’t see what lies below and fear losing it. I anchor it there. it relents. I stare at it. it shines back. I’m not satisfied. What's the point of this shape, anyway? a shape with a single-sided surface and a single edge? There are enough lines in my life outside the inside of my eyes. I don’t want to let this one reclaim me. If it succeeds, I’ll fall into the trap of covering up its sparseness with language. over-pulsating language. overpowering a scant static image. No, I refuse to be remote controlled by the concrete remnants of the outside. on the lookout to somehow freeze the fluid inside.
I want language to borrow words from pixels—the visual before the verbiage, the feeling before its expression, life—before its living. But I don’t want to coax an image. I’m in a room of my own on a bed of my own—pulse-impulsing—and I want an image that arrives unadulterated. without the shrewdness of experience. without the hangover of memory. without manipulation by imagination. without the brushstroke of words.
I press my eyelids tighter. to squeeze out an impression. I wander—adjusting the focus length—and then, at a distance—something—something else that stays. stays… sways…
a swing… emerging from a forest… or a forest frothing from the swing.
The forest—dark and dense. A plain swing, with ropes so long I can’t see where they are suspended from. There's no tree near the swing. The forest is further away. I don’t try to check where those long ropes lead up to. I’ll need to roll my eyeballs further up, which I dare not lest the scene itself disappears. Moving the frame without shaking the image is a higher-level skill. I’m a mere beginner. For now, the image has conceded to a poet’s pulse to capture it in its distilled movement. It is cooperating and I’m easy to satisfy:
a swing with thick jute ropes. a small ooden plank. just enough to seat a little girl. Well, I don’t see the plank. I’m standing on one side of the swing and there’s a little girl sitting on it. there must be a plank. Her legs are stretched but not fully. a kink at the knees. up she swings. her feet crossed—not legs. that’s what adults do—cross their legs. But thankfully she seems untouched by style. an ankle atop the other, like a footrest. as if she were watching TV on her couch. just a posture’s ease. or nonchalance.
Her legs don’t kick back, don’t stretch out—again and again—performing the physics of swinging. But she goes on swinging. higher and higher. slowing down. speeding up. even though there’s no one behind her. I’m not propelling her either. After all, I’m a keep-aside—to be precise, facing the swing’s right side—
outside the inside of my eyes.
I’m not in the frame at all. I’m not a participant. I see the girl from this line. swinging—
on rewind—wound to something pulsing.
I have no way to tell it’s a girl. I don’t see her face. or her clothes. But she has her sneakers on. are they pink or blue? But colour gives me the slip—it’s a luxury for the eye inside eyes. Colour-uncoded sneakers. laces tied. Sometimes girls tie them differently. and I can’t see how they are tied. I won’t lace and frill the image with pretty falsities. Gender-undecided—until my mind decides otherwise. I agree to believe my mind. I must establish trust to sustain the image. and I move…
no… not my eyeballs. just shift the focus to her face. I’m getting better with it. Now! Here I’m sure she is a girl. I was right to trust my mind. Her hair is tied in two pigtails. I can see only one, but I know she has two pigtails because if there’s one pointing down next to her right ear, there’s bound to be one on the left. Done loosely. tied with a thin ribbon, like my mother used to do for me once. old style pigtails. keeping time with an old swing.
I don’t see her face, but she has a small nose, small eyes, and thin lips. Just that. nothing else. not laughing. not sad. But why is she here alone on a swing with a forest on her side? she's as carefree as if it were in the garden outside her home. But does every why need an answer? is purpose always the objective of an action—do you always tap your feet with a motive? is an image supposed to provide an answer—and will it warp or bloom if I force one upon it? She does not look lost. She’s not scared to be out there alone in the wilderness. She’s pleased without wearing its awareness. But she does not seem to like being analysed,
and so, she draws her right leg in, folding at the knee and setting her foot on the plank.
And then someone calls out to me from the living room. I don’t answer. How can I surrender my image? the one that’s been kind enough to surface inside a box. without an artist’s premeditated colours or brushstrokes. providing a poet’s moment—
a vision refusing a foreign invasion—a vision diffusing the joy of a quiet grace into me—
of a little girl on a swing. right leg tucked in—swinging now with only one slightly bent leg to the sky—without even kicking back and forth—
as if with the lilt of her will.
My eyes squint with hers in concentration. and I don’t see her face.
She lowers her upper body—elbows hooked around the ropes, arms cascading back—the body now a small boat with two little oars. a pendulum-boat. across a sea of forest and clouds.
But the clouds are muddy. Or dark grey. Oh, no—they are moss green! and everything else is moss green. the forest to her far left, the sky, the clouds, the undulating terrain. light-moss, bright-moss, shadow-moss. all pulsing—moss green.
A definite upgrade. Has my brain finally recruited the higher visual cortex? —the V4 they say. One colour granted—but I’m elated. Is there a sun? Is there a moon? Why do I need to know, if there is phosphorescence? and light and shadow make do with just one colour. a colour of life—of life against odds.
But meanwhile someone calls out my name again while entering my room. I shut the lid of the box. a cushion sliding quickly over the side of my face. The slight tension on my eyelids goes undetected. I can’t afford to release the tension. I’ll lose the image and there’s no knowing if it will be as kind as it has been until now in making my acquaintance. The intruder leaves, leaving me alone,
and the girl swings. with a tiny mouth-boat springing up in a river of smile. A little girl birthing forth two boats: one riding a roguish river, the other swelling a serene sea.
Zooming in on the smaller boat isn’t an option. I continue to ride on the big boat. She’s not looking up at the sky as the boat goes up up up. Her head slightly tilts to the right. Why is she looking down? maybe it gives her a better idea of how high she is going up as the ground-distance increases. If she were to look upward instead, at the light moss-green sky with dark moss-green clouds, the distance would remain the same—sky-high all the time—at any or all infinitesimal points on the swing’s arc.
But now I feel greedy. I want her face. Everything is moss green except her. and she’s grey. Still, there’s her outline. I can improvise with that. I’m reading into her face—small nose, small eyes—ah! a hint of curiosity. And it suddenly strikes me that I know her from some place. from long ago. or not so long ago. six or seven years, maybe? She has the face of a student who once attended my lectures! barely someone who’d swing into being beyond her own being. and certainly not one with two pigtails. I can’t even recall her hairdo and yet here she is—her young adult face showing through my little girl. swinging on the swing. a leg to the sky. How did I reach there? or more appropriately, how did she reach here? I’d like to ponder over the logic, but can I indulge it as the original image teeters on the brink of extinction? —
and what a moss-pulsating joy it is to cling to a little girl on a pulse-swing.
surrounded by moss green. despite green moss.
But the image is already moving on. The frame has shifted—without my effort—without my consent. I stole her face for my girl, but she has captured the centre of my frame. I recollect that she was a bit of an attention seeker. and curious. and a little mischievous but not enough to become a teacher’s lasting memory. merely the owner of a mild smirk. And my own mouth’s now a boat if I were to look at it. How is she doing in life? Is she still curious? Has she retained her smirk-boat? at home? in office? or has she stuffed it in some shoe…?
At this point I realise I’ve lost the image of my own—replaced by another—through a finagling of memory. And with it, the verbiage, unmindful of the pixels, is overtaking the visual. I don’t try to conjure it back—not that it would have responded favourably to my plea. I may have lost it, but the swing is still moving—somewhere—where it does not wish to be entered. But I’m able to shake off the alien entry too and words rush in like golden morning birdsongs.
Eyes shut.
Pulse racing.
Tracing peace.
greys swell in light
shapes, non-shapes
coalesce, collapse
a swing in a forest
or a forest from a swing
no, a girl…
a body-boat
sailing from forest to
clouds of moss
in the lilt of her will
on rewind
wound to my heartbeat
Perhaps everything breathes it's a-while—images, reflections, projections, relations—even an over-pulsating pulse. I wonder what my pulse is up to. Most likely it has returned to the mundane, to its usual rhythm, as everything that has ever breathed a while eventually does—pulsing below the pulse.
And I think it’s safe to get out of my box now or even write a possible story of a poem that my bed swung into me.
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