#mp; w.c 001

[heatherxmp]

Gnosis 🌊 W.C 001 (Core Memories)

{{ For the Monthly Writing Challenge of March dealing with core memories. Again, this was held onto by me for a bit due to life and work going hectic. }}

Gnosis, noun; “knowledge” or “awareness” from the Greek. Often used for personal knowledge compare with intellectual knowledge.

🌊

   Heather exhales and smiles. Then he smiles as he lays there in the warmth of his bed and lets the feeling of it drift around his sleepy mind. The wash of memories that flood him are dancing fragments of time that play back in little snippets drawing up sensations not only in his mind but across his body.

    He remembers the feeling of it; the sudden seizing of his heart the first time, the way he wondered if he was sick as he felt both hot and cold at the same time when his eyes fell upon that face for the first time. There’s a little laugh from the siren as memories keep flowing. The ghost of what that hand felt like in his, or the way that laugh bounced between his ears the first time he heard it. It wove itself into who he knows and it’s stuck there happily in his very being. Heather, half asleep and remembering everything, can still tell you the way that the weight of that memory on his chest telling him the happenings of the day, or how it felt to watch every sunrise and forget it in favor of remembering how it painted orange and yellow light across the cheekbones of someone else.

    And it doesn’t hurt to remember all these things because they were beautiful things to feel. To smell. To touch. To learn and experience.These little snippets of memories that make up his life and the things, places and people - person- they’re attached to are precious because they mean he lived them.

   Heather opens his eyes and knows it’s another new day. Another day to create things he’ll look back on later and remember the ways felt when they happened. Just as he is now.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Inhale.

   He sits up and watches light try to fight its way in through the black out currents of his room before he yawns. It’s another new day and that’s worth living just to see what might weave itself into his mind forever. His eyes drift to the pillows beside his own and he smiles again now.

   It’s another new day and he’s got more memories to make.

[mpxkiki]

Passing Notes || W.C01 Self Para

{{ This is for the first writing challenge we had in March. Sadly, due to work and a long bout of exhaustion following working too much, I had to put it aside. But things are getting better! This is loooooooong af but I like it. So here it is, writing challenge number 1; Core Memories. }}

🌿

…One summer in America…

   Her fingers brush the keys lightly. It had to be a dream! 

   There in the living room was the most beautiful thing she’s ever laid her eyes on. By the window with the early evening sunset casting dancing shadows of leaves from the outside across its dark brown surface is the piano from the shop. For the better part of a year she had been admiring that piano as she passed the music shop each day after school with her sister. It was an old and seemingly forgotten thing that decorated the window but it had a proudness about it that pulled Kihara to it. Five days a week, rain or shine, she walked by that piano and two days a week, she got to practice the things she learned in her school’s music class on it. 

   A year almost of quiet admiration had not gone unnoticed. Her mother, an observant but clever woman, had watched many a night go by where her daughter played on the surfaces of tables or on the tops of her own thighs some melody that only she could hear. She had seen the scribbling of music on the edges of assignments, shopping lists, bits of paper towels and even once in lipstick on the bathroom mirror! Her sister had gossiped to their mother that the library had less books on its vast aisles of shelves than her sister had songs buzzing around in her mind at any given moment. It wasn’t until Kiki’s close friend, Dakota, had remarked once as he waited for her to come back from some outing that if she didn’t get a keyboard or something of her own soon he would have to charge her for always using his.

   He had, of course, been kidding, but that sparked the determination in Kiki’s mother well enough. So the shifts at work got longer and family time got just a little bit shorter. It became just a little bit harder for Kihara’s sister to make time for things as she took up more babysitting offers and even Dakota was suddenly much busier than usual citing that he was ‘busy with family stuff’.

   A couple days turned into a couple weeks. A couple weeks turned into a month and a half of this newfound open time. And it wasn’t that it was bad…but to Kihara who was mostly accustomed to someone always being around or needing her, the absence of her usual crew was sharply felt. 

  When it verged on two months and eight days that she had last seen anyone for longer than a brief minute of hellos and goodbyes for the day, she had decided that she would say something. It would be today. It had to be today! And so just as usual- this new usual - she rose to both her mother and sister already gone and her phone quiet of texts and started the day. She’d tell them when they came home for dinner.

   “Goodbye house,” she says as she locks the door and makes her way down the street. She doesn’t stop as she rounds the corner nor when she passes Dakota’s house. There’s no one there anyway. She keeps going straight on toward school, passing the music shop. Deep in her thoughts, Kihara doesn’t notice the widow has changed. There’s something missing today in that glass that her tired face walks right by. Absorbed in the mystery of the sudden loneliness of her young life, she doesn’t see that her sister isn’t in first period and Dakota isn’t in fourth. Nose to the grindstone, she goes through her day lost in the tanglement of worries that somehow she’s offended the people in her life enough that they forgot her being there.

  It’s not until later in the day when she’s walking home that things slowly begin to become clear. Her phone buzzes with a call and she flips it open to answer, not caring to try and see if the little screen will or won’t display a name this time. “Yeah?”

   “Jeez, you must not miss me at all if that’s how you answer my call, huh?” A familiar voice sounds off on the other end of the line. Dakota. DAKOTA! Kiki pauses in her walking, her feet mere steps away from that glass window that holds her favorite escape. There’s a pause from her side and then a worbbled reply from her. “Oh… hey..”

  “You crying?” Dakota asks.

  “No! I just… I thought you forgot about me.”

  “A little hard to forget you loser. Stop crying, for real. You almost home?”

   Kihara sniffles a little but clears her throat. It’s not like she missed anyone- they didn’t go anywhere, they were just busy or whatever! “Yeah I was just heading th—“

   Her eyes drift mid-sentence to the window and her heart plummets to her feet. The piano that was once there is gone. The spot is occupied sits open, the carpet darker where it had protected it from the sun and paler where it’s protections stopped. Dakota’s voice is like a distance sound as he asks if she’s good. Then again as he asks if she’s there once, twice, a few more times. It’s a simple thing, the piano not being there. But to her it was like the dissolution of her young hopes. This coupled with her already rough two months was just a little too much and a noise she doesn’t mean to make leaves her.

  “Kiks, come home okay?” Her ears catch his voice again. Her face feels wet and as she wipes at it and clears her throat again she listens this time. “Your mom needs you to check something and she called me because you didn’t pick up her call.” She had missed a call?

  “I’ll be there in a bit.” And that’s all she says before she hangs up and makes the rest of the walk home with her eyes stinging and a deeper heaviness she doesn’t really understand. It doesn’t take long before she’s home again and as she walks toward the door, a small comfort is that from the front window is Dakota’s face peering out at her. When they meet eyes he smirks before disappearing from the front window with his light eyes and all too happy smirk that feels almost insulting to her grief. What is there to smile about?

   Stepping inside the house she kicks off her shoes and sets down her bag as she walks through the front of the house and turns to the living room. “Why are you her—“

  The question dies on her tongue as she takes in the sigh of her mother, her sister and Dakota standing in the living room just next to something that quickens her heartbeat again. There, in the early evening sunset light from the window, is the piano from the shop. It sits proudly in her living room as the shadows of leaves from outside dance across its dark brown surface. A giant red bow sits atop the piano and as she looks to the people she calls family things make a little more sense. The long hours at her mother’s job, her sister taking more babysitting gigs, and Dakota being ‘busy’. 

   “Well, don’t just stare at it.” Her mother laughs and moves to guide Kiki to the bench before it. “Play me one of those beautiful songs you make.”

   And this time, as her fingers brush the keys, Kihara does cry. Because she may have felt lonely, but she was never really alone. The people in the room had loved her enough to give more of themselves to give her a little more of herself.

   Her fingers press the keys and as the living room actually becomes alive with sound, she knows, she’ll never forget this.