Not only is the title of this blog ‘The Yellow Taxi’, but it is completely irrelevant to whatever I am going to blog about. To be honest, I have nothing to blog about. So this blog is about nothing. Nothing at all. There is nothing more great than the power of nothing. So if nothing is nothing, what is nothing? There is no shame in nothing. I love this. Good-bye.
(: You’re a freak.
“Do you know what it’s like to be a ghost?” she asked suddenly turning over to her side, her eyes wide with a life full of unanswerable questions.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I simply replied.
It was like any other summer night we spent laying on the cooling pavement of her driveway. The smell of the hot days melted into the relieving chilled nights. Chlorine tingled around our noses from neighboring pools. Blue tint from TV’s flickered in bedrooms all down the street giving off little light other than the old lamp post that barely illuminated the corner of the cul-de-sac. We’d spend hours laying there staring up at the countless stars, having conversations about everything that meant nothing to anyone else, until the hours crept into the early AM.
Every summer night we’d do this until school began again. Then I’d watch her get into her car and wave goodbye from the backseat as she left for another school year on the Atlantic coastline. I was never sad when she left. I always reassured myself that she’d return in another nine months. She always did.
“But you don’t have to believe in them to wonder what it’s like to feel like one,” she pressed on. I watched her from the corner of my eye as she scanned my face for an answer. I kept still.
“That doesn’t make any sense Ayla.”
She quickly sat up and stared up at the sky. “Nothing is supposed to make sense. Why the sky is blue doesn’t make sense. Why we rotate around the sun doesn’t make sense. Why we have to put periods at the end of our sentences doesn’t even make sense.” She stretched her arm up towards the sky and pinched at nothing while squinting through one eye. “Do you think one day we’ll be able to touch stars?”
I sighed, shaking my head. “Now you’re just being ridiculous.”
She dropped her arm letting her hand smack the ground bringing my eyes away from the sky.
“How?”
“By asking such silly questions.”
“But you only answer with such silly answers,” she countered.
I sighed again, shutting my eyes.
“There is no way we’d be able to touch stars. One, they’re light years away. Two, even if we got technology to get to a star they would be too hot or too cold to touch. Plus stars are made up of gases, you can’t really touch a gas. Does that answer your question?”
Ayla suddenly stood over me with her a hand on each hip. Her face crunched up into a glare. She hated when I talked science to her. She knew that it meant I had no interest in her topic. I stared up at her, her long brown hair cascading over her shoulders and casing her round face. I couldn’t help but let out a small laugh breaking her little staring contest and her lips cracking into a smile. This was my best friend.
“You have a weird way of looking at things Dennis.” She looked up at the sky again. “Looks like it’s time for me to go inside.”
Her hair whipped against the gust of wind and she closed her eyes, stretching her arms wide open. Her pale skin contrasted with the dark night. She inhaled and span away from me and let out a little giggle. She then stuck out her hand, along with her popsicle stained tongue, and helped me off the ground.
“If you don’t get inside soon,” she got on her tip toes and ruffled my hair a bit which was still a bit damp from swimming earlier, “you’ll catch a cold.”
This story makes it hard for me to breathe.
(via runawaytrain)
(:
So much has gone on. And none of it, good.
Swine Flu. Followed by Celebrity Deaths. Followed by Local Deaths.
Is there something we’re just not catching on to ?
I think this is a sign and we need to figure out what it means.
Thank God this year is coming to an end… Better 2010, please.
R.I.P Taylor Walton
R.I.P Stephen Mattress
R.I.P Gavin Westover
Heaven got lucky. <3
(via fuckyeahhlove)
Hello life. </3
“0.57% of the 228403 people who have taken this quiz are like you.”
I took the 43 Things Personality Quiz…
Should I feel good about that ?
I’ve loved words ever since I picked up a book to read when I was
six or seven years old. After I opened that book and began to read,
I was lost in the worlds that I found in Enid Blyton stories; and
have often spent my time reading since. My brother and I were given
a huge old cardboard box full of old paperbacks which used to belong
to my older cousins. Franklin W Dixon’s Hardy Boys, Carolyn Keene’s
inquisitive Nancy, and many other old stories kept me enthralled and
gripped as the yellowed pages flowed with adventure and excitement.
It seemed as if anything could be done, if only you could imagine
it, and write it down. I remember thinking to myself when I was
eight, that I wanted to be an `author’. I didn’t know a lot then
about what an author did. I thought that End Blyton spent her days
working hard, hunched over a desk as she wrote on large sheets of
clean paper with dark ink out of a quill. It sounded great fun,
merely sitting down and writing stories that came to my mind. I
decided then that that was what I wanted to do.
I’ve been writing since I was eight. The spelling of my first
attempt was horrible and so was my writing, but constant work has
definitely improved all of this. Sometimes I write right after I’ve
been struck by a strong wave of emotion, or after I’ve realised
something that I didn’t think about before. Then, I can’t wait to
grab a sheet of paper and a pencil to see what I might write.
I’ve spent hours and hours writing away my thoughts on lined
sheets of paper. Sometimes when I start, I feel like the
possibilities are endless. One thought follows another and I often
end up writing on a variety of topics that I haven’t thought about
in a while. I might start talking about how my day went, to
something silly someone did on that day, to what she told me that
day, and refer it to something else she’d said on a similar topic on
another day. I’d go about in entire circles and find myself with a
full page of scribbles after 20 minutes. And when I reread what I’d
written, I find myself expressing ideas in ways that I didn’t think
about consciously. As if I’d just written down something and found a
truth in myself that I didn’t know I had.
When I write, I often have the next word in my mind. I’d watch
my pen dance and form alphabets across the lines, slowly marking
down my unique thoughts into a system that someone else can
interpret and read. That is something that is so wonderfully
captivating about writing. How you may somehow write something, and
if worded perfectly, it would capture the essence of the emotion
that you were trying to create. If one exact word was wrong, or the
sentence was not fluent and did not flow, the writing was crippled
and needed the help of a good dictionary or a thesaurus. Sometimes,
I would ask to read my friend’s journals or compositions. And I’m
still floored at how many people just write without structure or
regard for the proper word or the appropriate usage of a certain
shade of meaning. I suppose that not many people may understand
this love.
Everywhere you go, you see words. You refer to books,
newspapers, watch words fly in advertisements and decorate
television screens. You see alphabets when you turn on your
computer, look at reminders on your refrigerators or on notepads.
Words and its humble components, alphabets, are like little magic
playthings that have this ability to create anything that you
wanted. You could create emotion, money (in advertising), record a
thought forever, an entire world in 50,000 words, write a dialogue
that would show you how people think, how people see this world.
Words are like the life source of ever idea and every thought that
comes into being the moment you think it. You need words to express
emotion. How far could you go with hand gestures? Could all of the
waving and gesticulating and grunting compel your friend to feel
exactly the same way if either of you couldn’t talk or read and
write?
Sometimes I pick up a pen and look at the blank sheet, I feel
like I’m coming home. I’d write away, and surrender to the
familiarity of being slumped over a desk as my right hand flies
across the page. On other days, when I confront the computer screen,
I type away merely to hear the continuous tapping of keys being
punched. (I think that having a silent keyboard on a laptop will be
a living nightmare.)
The charm of writing is that when you write out something that
you’re really proud of, you get hooked. You start wondering if
you’re able to do that again. Soon you find yourself writing away at
everything and nothing, typing out words onto a screen that don’t
mean a thing until you clean up the whole act and start over. The
challenge is to be able to write exactly what you mean, to convey
your thoughts with clarity to the reader to evoke the emotion that
you want to portray. You may become the slave to your Autocorrect on
your computer, or the owner of a well-thumbed dictionary, chasing
nuances and meanings to see if you’ve chosen the correct word for
your sentence. Yet the beauty and flaw of writing is that it is not
an exact science. This means that you never stop learning.
And then when you finally start, and begin to fall in love with
the simple matter of allowing your thoughts to gel and create words,
you learn the joys of a secret that many writers know. You learn
what it is like to create your world. You cry and laugh at the
characters you see and mold and give birth to. You know why one
particular character has a quirky way of smiling, or why another is
shy of birds. You would love the ease of greeting these characters
and your words as you watch them grow day by day. Or if you may
never turn your hand to creating characters, you’ll start of a
journey of searching and exploration. You may never know that you’d
felt that way about an issue until you wrote it down. It is a path
where you watch yourself grow and mature and think.
How interesting it is, that simple tools such as words could
create this pleasure. Yet we forget how selfish we may be. In my
anger, if I ever wrote a letter to the person I was mad at, I may
regret it forever or be scalded by shame for ever admitting I felt
like that. Words are not like little playthings that may be used for
pain or gain or show. In a writer’s hands, words are just symbols
that need to be rearranged to mean something. If we who love words
so are able to create wonders with them, let us stop there. There is
no joy is spreading hurt of malice, and no place for spite in a
decent letter.
I remember thinking right before I turned on this computer,
that I meant to write a journal about how much I love writing. And
when I read back, these paragraphs have walked me down memories and
reminded me of thoughts that I’d forgotten about. I’ve just spent an
hour dedicating this to you, my reader. I didn’t know that I would
finish this essay this way, or that the words I’ve written would
write themselves this easily. Through the simple act of reading
this, you and I share an experience unique because I may never write
another essay like this, and you will never be able to read this
essay again, for the first time.(by Krystal Duflair)
Wow. This is so inspiring.
Thanks for following moi. (:
