Vignettes

Matthew David Waite



Before It Explodes


Before it explodes observe it, feel its power in your mind and let it dissolve in your hands and perspire off your skin.  I want you to enjoy it. I want you to never forget it.  But don’t let it lie to you or you to it.  Don’t let its beauty dig into your skin.  I beg of you, be afraid.  Look at its destruction.  Do you understand it?  Do you believe in it?  What if it was never there?  Or you? 
I’ve seen many things explode, but the best part is before they actually explode.  The adrenaline attacks your nerves like venom from a snake, and your hands shake as if the Earths Teutonic plates were overriding each other in your hands themselves.  I’m not talking about fireworks; I’m talking about the explosion of the mind when a human being has an epiphany, innovation, invention, theory, idea, dream, or even love.  The emotions we have before the actual explosion are as if the apocalypse were to happen tomorrow.  But we would probably forget about it the very next day.

…Her eyes jumpstart my heart as if it were a car, then her touch scalds my skin, as her laugh rattles my vertebrate like a rattle snakes tail.  I can see her from the opposite side of the world, I can hear her words from the moon.  I would even stare at her if she were the sun, even though I would go blind.  I would die for her even if she doesn’t love me.







Frozen Ground

Last winter I had to go to my great uncles funeral.  I’ve seen the dead before and it’s hard for me to look at them, as if they would look back at me real quick, or try to scare me somehow.  I can always picture myself being there in a cherry coffin, with my arms stretched down the sides, my eyelids closed and my heart missing, taken away for someone else to use. 
The one aspect that seeds through my mind is the look of that dead man’s hands, they looked as if they were already decomposed, with flat veins and a pure dark color of despair.  I don’t plan on another funeral, the emotions are too powerful, as if they were the pressure of water on a submarine.  I’m afraid of when my parents will be lying in front of me to see, their eyes shut from me to disappear behind.  I fear the difference between life and death.  You can live and be free or you can die and perhaps just vanish, just disappear into an abyss.

…Can you imagine your wife or husband dying before you?  What do you do?  Wait until you die, kill yourself, lose your sanity?  What would I do?  How long would I last without her?










It Didn’t Belong


When I cleaned the gutters of my house it was growing dark and I decided to climb up to the very top of the roof.  When I reached the top I sat down and looked at the sky.  It looked like it was lost.  So beautiful that it shouldn’t of been there teasing our ugly dreams and our pathetic societies in such a romantic and graceful style, as if a painter left an oil painting outside in showers of rain.  It was a pitch violet in places, then an orange to pink, with a very humble red.  As the sky darkened and the moon rose the red remained in the clouds far off over the lake as I began to dream.
The stars reminded me of when my parents brought me and my sister outside to watch a meteor shower.  I made wishes full of dreams and fiction, but I put full honesty in them.  I wait around for one of those wishes to come true, but none have come true.  I learned that you can wish upon a star but the only time your wish can come true is when you work for it, you put effort into getting where you want to be or be with, and sometimes you need to know when to give up.














Why?


I’ve thought long and hard over the years to see if my life was actually worth living, especially on those weeks of weeks and days of days that seem to not favor me at all.  Many times it has come to the point where I’ve imagined myself dead with some great poem or letter left to read on my chest.  I’ve found out why I should stay.  Mainly for my friends and family that I don’t want to lose.  But Mostly having children someday to watch and help grow, and a great wife to last as long as I.  To watch with her many moons pass, along with the sunrises and sunsets, cradling her in my arms at night with our hearts bonded, circulating each others blood to one another, and her hair whispering across my face as the midnight breeze hollows through the window.  Why does it have to hurt so much?  Why is it so unfair?  Why is it only from me?  And why do I not see it in front of my eyes, hear it between my ears, feel it in my heart?  I fear mine will always be beating alone until it just fades out, fades away into the background of a meaningless extinction, like a lost clock. 











Fallen Apart


I’m rocking back and forth in a rocking chair staring at the cracks in the weathered Oak floor.  She is gone, frozen in time, only in my memory till I die.
Every Sunday I trudge my way to her gravestone to wash it with my tears, to stare at it, to make a wish.  My daughter laughs like her, smiles like her, and has eyes as hers.  I can’t look at her the same anymore, she makes my heart fall apart, as if it was only held together with tape, as if it was run over by a car and eaten by a wild dog.