By Daniel J. Klotz
Since my door is closed, I rock back in my chair and put my feet up on my desk. If my mom saw me with my feet up there she’d complain that I shouldn’t do that. But it’s okay because the door to my bedroom is closed.
I have a nice chair. I saved up my money and bought a leather executive office chair at an office store. I sink back in it and stay there. It’s a good place to escape — just sitting there in my black chair with my feet propped up on my desk. Nothing around to stop my mind from wondering, no one to tell me just how I must sit in the chair or what I should think about. Thoughts are hard to harness anyhow, and I’m glad no one is trying to control mine at the moment.
In my mind I grab my clipboard and head off to the woods where I find a log to sit on and start writing. I’m not sure what I’m writing, but in my mind I begin to write.
I sit there on that log for a few days, pouring my thoughts onto paper, expressing my self in ink. Eventually I finish, and I stand up. I crumple the pages I have just finished and toss them into a nearby creek. I watch as they float solemnly away. I’d like to think that maybe someday they’ll reach a river or a lake, but I know that just around the bend they’ll get stuck on some rocks where they will remains captives until they dissolve into nothing.
None of this bothers or phases me. I take it as if it is something everyone does, as if everyone sits for days writing and then throws the papers into a creek without a second thought.
What if I had saved the papers? No one would care. Those words are as irrelevant as the thoughts which inspired them.
In my childhood, adults persuaded me otherwise — that all of those things I think and hope and worry matter. But teenhood conquered my naiveté and I learned that no one wished to retrieve those writings from the creek. I learned quickly that all that I held sacred in my mind meant nothing once loosed.
I turn from the creek and start toward the trail home, but today I am curious. I just want to see where my papers have gotten stuck. I walk to the creek and slowly choose the best way to follow it without getting my overly-worn running shoes wet.
A briar snaps against my arm and I bleed. But the wound goes unnoticed - I am intent on getting farther down the creek. I near a bend, and follow it, intent on the creek bed. A small noise to my left distracts me, and I raise my eyes. There sits man, sitting cross-legged on the ground, peering through reading glasses at the top of a stack of crumpled papers.
“You should really read these,” he says, looking up at me as if I had been there all along. “They’re really quite interesting.”
“What do you do?” I asked the man. “Why do you sit here?”
“Every day I come down here to the creek to look for writings,” he says. “I interest myself in the dreams of others.” “Why do you do such a thing?” I ask.
But I cannot imagine a reason why, so I sit up in my chair and gaze out the window at a hillside decorated with the color of brilliant, yet dying, foliage.
© 2001 Daniel J. Klotz