Certain Things

Certain places just make you think. Certain people just make you feel. Certain sights and sounds, just bring back memories. Certain things make you feel and wonder, and remember. It is one of those things in life that I'll never fully comprehend. I'll smell something, and I'll think back to when I was a child, or when I was happy, or when some one died. It won't just trigger the memory of those events, but the memory of those emotions. It brings back everything I felt and thought at that particular time in my life. I feel as if, for an instant, I am back at that place, and that moment in my life. I am four years old again, seeing my mother crying the hallways. I am six, getting on an airplane for the first time. I am eight, standing in the middle of the Australian outback, staring up at the milky of the Milky Way. I am eleven, starting my first day at school, terrified of the people and the place. I am thirteen, getting my first kiss in a pool. I remember all of these things intensely, and every time, I feel as if I am transported back to that time and place, as if I am living it all over again.

I think that is why I can write with such graphic detail. I can close my eyes and actually transport myself in my head, be that person, be that time and place. I can be the wind, rushing through the leaves, whispering against warm skin, brushing through soft strands of hair, teasing them upwards and about in my fingers. I am that breath of wind, for just a moment. For just a second I can imagine myself having no true form, just feeling things, just being a stirring of air. I can feel myself being the cold, being insubstantial, and having the ability to touch without being seen or touched. I can be the person who the wind touches, feel the touch of cold where it touches my skin, the sharp pink touching my skin in reaction, the numbness of fingertips and the end of my nose. I can smell where the breath of wind has been, as it carries on it the smell of people, of dead and dying dry leaves. I can taste the smells of firewood and hot soup in the soft breeze. This is whow i write. I write as if I was there, as if it was me. I write by completely removing myself from myself and being some one else entirely. At least this is what I try to do. Then again, I don't know what other people would notice that I might not, or what I might notice that other people wouldn't. Still, the shifting of my perspective to somewhere outside myself, is an easy transition. I can look at things from another angle. I can step outside myself and see myself objectively. I look at myself as others here must perceive me, and I wonder if I have already done too much to build walls between myself and other people. I'm trying to be sociable, but I find I act more like a cat. I come to people when I am ready to and not before. I do not smile as much as I probably should, do not make myself as approachable as I could, or talk about things that interest everyone else. I don't think along the same lines, and am quick to criticize view points, play devil's advocate to other people's ways of thinking. I will quickly go from arguing one point to arguing another in the space of a heartbeat. I'm sure I just seem argumentative, difficult, blindly biased, and aggressive. I'm honestly not, I just think too much. I'm interested in how people think. It fascinates me to poke people in different directions, just to see how they will react. It's an honest desire just to understand what it is that makes them behave the way they do, what makes them tick. I want to see what will happen if I make them angry enough, or what will happen if I push the right buttons. Maybe I'm manipulative, but I can't help how much it intrigues me, I want to know.

I want to know why we function the ways that we do. I want to study each person's autobiography and find ways to draw connections between their family life and their view points. I want to find ways to make connections between how people react to one another, and the major turning points in their lives. I love to watch people and body language. It fascinates me how easily people say one thing, with full honesty, yet their body posture screams something else, and even more so, how their friends and the people they speak to, don't even seem to notice. Is it because their friends really want to believe them? Or is it because they just don't want to tell the lying party, that they know they aren't being straightforward. I want to understand how one person can be obviously in love with some one else, and yet not know it, or at least not want to acknowledge it. Especially when the other person is just as obviously in love with them. I want to know how we are all strangely connected.