Limbo
Sometimes, in the fickle weather of southern Florida, buttery sunshine will morph into torrential downpour and bellowing thunder. She doesn’t notice the way her room turns into shadowy grays for a while, but then she chances a glimpse. It is then she stares for a moment, enthralled by the beautiful power of the storm, how the rain beats down in thick sheets, slapping the concrete and whipping the plant life; or how the deep-throated rumbles of the thunder make her windowpane tremble with fear. She thinks about dancing in the midst of all the power, spinning and skipping and letting cold water rush all over her skin and all through hair, feeling the clap of thunder rattling her bones. She was told once that turkeys liked to look up at the sky upon the first drop of rain with their mouths open in fascination, but then the stupid things would drown. It was probably a silly urban myth, but it made her wonder. She’d never before looked up to see how the rain fell from the sky. It seemed a natural curiosity to look, to see where the strange water was coming from, but she hadn’t done it. She hadn’t ever danced in the rain either. Why hadn’t she done it?
And then she will remember why she hasn’t ever danced in the rain, as she breaks her gaze and turns back to the books and papers sprawled out about the desk in front of her. Lines and lines of numbers and symbols on the papers; they seem to merge and become mere blurs of pencil and eraser smudge. Books that demand: the fluid force on a circular end of a horizontal tank of diameter 3 feet if the tank is half full of gasoline that weighs 42 pounds per cubic foot. This is where she spends her life. She doesn’t even enjoy numbers, or the sciences. They are her weakest subjects, and she struggles.
She did it because it was difficult, because her parents had told her taking difficult courses would lead to a prestigious university, and a prestigious university would lead her to a successful and happy life in old age. She hadn’t the faintest idea of what she wanted in the future. Her friends had specific dreams; to go to MIT and become engineers. She did not know, and so she took the most difficult path, thinking that should she decide in the future, she would have all doors open to her through the path. It would be better to waste the energy than to have not expended it and missed what she truly wanted. She would know in time.
But she’s failing. The complete lack of will and heart. She makes lists, lots of to-do lists, of things crucial to be completed, and yet they lay undone. She knows her time is running out, and she must make the most of it, but she does not. She sits down, hoping to scratch a task off the list today. She opens a book; her mind goes elsewhere, her eyes drift out the window, and her heart is not in it. She cannot swallow the numbers. So she says she will try again tomorrow, a new day, a blank slate. She promises she will snap out of it tomorrow. But the weight of perpetual failure is not one easily lifted, and tomorrow brings no better attitude than today. So she is startled as the suns suddenly disappear, and she realizes she has wasted yet another day, and she is scared and nervous because the days are flying from her, and she is so powerless to catch them.
She is lost. She does not know what she wants or where she wants to go. Suddenly the promise of a happy life cannot move her, because she does not know what this happy life is. It all seems very futile now, very hopeless. Try and try, and she will still fail. What is the use of these numbers and difficult courses? She is not going anywhere special. There is nothing tangible to attain. She is lost.
There are things she dreams of doing. Sitting on a porch in wintry North Carolina before the sun rises in her pajamas with a mug of steaming hot cocoa, watching the stars slowly disappear and a blue light trickle slowly over the world, replaced by the fiery orange of the sun as it climbs up mountains. Lying on a sailboat and drifting away without a care while the sun takes its final bow in a splendid array of splattered paint. Climbing a tree and lying in the boughs for hours with a delicious novel. Dancing in the power of a storm.
And her friends, they ask, why don’t you do them? She tells them she is too busy with the numbers. She says that the time spent by the window at the desk will buy her the time in the future to do those things.
But she knows inside her that time is not infinite, she knows it as it slips through her very fingers, in front of her very eyes. She knows it as the storm blows away and the sun returns, only to disappear away in a matter of minutes, and another day has gone.
She’s wandering. She’s cannot hold onto the days, caught in the dead space. She cannot live for the fleeting happiness of sunsets and sunrises for fear of wasting the time for her studies. And yet, she cannot focus on the study for the lure of the powerful storm she yearns to dance in, right outside her very window. The day wasted for both causes. She is confused and unsure of how to consolidate her two desires, her brain and her heart in an unending state of war that causes the sun’s journey to accelerate with the passing minutes.
The days are lost, and she is lost, caught between dream and reality and achieving neither.
Claire Zhang is a seventeen year old high school student in love with the English language. She loves reading, and manipulating words to create beauty and magic. Her life consists of the mundane – school, homework, and chatting with friends, but she always find the seemingly mundane always makes the best stories.
