Revolution
Sometimes I like to spin. Free, unattached, yet grounded by stitches of bones and sinew, to the great Earth, which slowly but steady mirrors my movements, revolving around its only sun. This sun is merely a great ball of fire, burning through our atmosphere, a flame we can only admire—never to touch.
Even with my eyes closed, it remains as a dark red spot in the projections of my very being. The thin membrane of my eyelid creates a false distance between the light and this world, which continues to die even as it makes attempts at Life. Indeed, I close my eyes so that its true form does not burn itself to my pupils, carving its intricate design of rays and of heat.
It would be too hard.
The lingering attachment of that flickering flame is an addiction that I will not be able to stand. What will I do during the night?
--
The whole of human existence, I think, is just a mesh of stresses and releases: the ebb and flow of a tide of emotions, a vicious cycle caused solely by the dysfunctional relationship between the lovers, Water and Sand.
I know better. Or, at least, I should.
A laugh laced with both bitterness and irony barely escapes my lips into the cold, night air, creating a mushroom of frost that leaves as quickly as it was born. I have hurt and been hurt more than enough times to know that sand, merely little fragments of coral and sharp glass, is never worth the freedom of the sea.
And so my story begins, in a land where the ocean never seems to learn this one cardinal rule, with a single doll. It has always started with a doll.
When I was born, they gifted me with one of those dolls that they found at a church garage sale. It was of plastic, sticky with the stains of sugar, with one eye perpetually closed, leaving its face with only one startling blue circle and an aura of eerie unease. Its clothes were stereotypically frilly and covered in ruffles—and what more could a Girl possibly want with her silent companion?
My memory seems to fail me as to what happened to it, though. All I know is that it was my sole and, therefore, prized possession that never left my bedside, a friend that I could never be separated from without a great deal of screaming and tantrum throwing. I remember it had a name or, rather, that I had, in my few days with her, given her a name that cemented our connection, a name that seems to have slipped from my memory as I have grown and we have been separated.
I don’t know why I remember any of this, being as small as I was. Actually, now that I think about it, it’s probably all a fabrication of my mind, a willful projection of the brain trying to convince the rest of me that I have something, anything, in common with these people they tell me made me, created my soul.
It’s just that I shouldn’t even try to recall any of these memories that have, through the incomprehensible thoughts I, no doubt, had in early infanthood, seeped into my blood, flowing through all the organs, an essential lubricant to the machines that calculate every aspect of my life. Merely a part to recognize, never to be examined for the more mature, adult notions of correctness.
--

Planes are such romantic things, aren’t they? They foster an inorganic, unnatural bond between individuals living far away—a metallic link of sorts, with seats bought with golden tickets with promises of the stars and a nonjudgmental sky, merely observing the whims of humankind.
Unfortunately, I guess I was never one for this romance of ages, falling victim to the plummeting air pressure and my subsequent, shrill, childish screams. To the other time-weary travelers, I was most definitely a nuisance, but I could not feel their frowns of disapproval as the fluid in the innermost part of the cochlea began vibrate at an intensity that corresponded with my terror at being thrust into an unknown setting. (It had been a mere three months since my entrance to this planet, so why was I being forced into a new world so quickly? Babies should be illegal on airplanes.)
The next few years passed in a rose-colored blur of loving grandparents, an endearing cousin (half zoo animal that you could feed with the remains of your lunch), and scars from running too fast from five flights stairs to the “welcoming” embrace of the ground. This was the time of milestones: first words, first steps, first loves that would provide the basis for humanity, for socially constructed morals to be inflicted upon the child through innocent bedtime stories and everyday interactions. For, if the first phase of my life is the blood running through my veins, this is when the structural foundation of my existence was sewn, keeping me grounded to the only seemingly stable thing in my life, my (somewhat makeshift) family.
So, when it all came crashing down, my resolve shaken beyond repair, it came as no surprise the origin, an act more terrifying than anything I had ever known or that anything I will ever experience in the foreseeable future. Moving. For the second and final time, back to the land where I was born, with the people who I was to call my parents.
Needless to say, I was broken beyond repair, as if the ground had ruptured just beyond my very feet, leaving me crumpled to my knees, a house caught in the midst of an earthquake.
If I were to paint my last farewell, it would be one, small splatter of blue in the middle of a very large, very blank canvas. What was I to know beyond the overwhelming, paralyzing sadness in this place, a tiny corner of the universe I had henceforth adopted as my very own? What was I to do in a place halfway around the world with different customs, a different language, and, most importantly, people that I did not know nearly well enough? I was lost, a speck caught in the wind without any real direction and with no way to control my course.
I was left with a keychain in my bag, in the shape of the distorted face of a young girl. It was supposed to be smiling, I think, but a slight error in the stitching of the mouth turned the face into something of a grimace, something with which I could relate all too well. My cousin, the animal, had bought it for me with the money he had saved up from three months’ allowances, from the women, sitting on homespun blankets, who sell little trinkets every Friday to the tourists who wander around the town. It occurred to me that, from now on, I would be considered a tourist here, where I had the first real experiences of my life; in the place I would always consider my hometown.
After half-heartedly saying my goodbyes—I was going to return soon, I promised everyone, I turned to go on the taxi to the airport. With tears cascading down my face, I was too scared to look back; for fear that a glance in the direction of these people who raised me would bring me crawling back to them. Instead, I clutched at the keychain, hoping that, somehow, its metal outlines would rebuild the walls of my heart, filling it with sugar and memories of the past as opposed to the emptiness I felt taking over. They were gone.
I was gone.
--

And so I stand, in the middle of a dark landscape, lamenting my sorrows. Obviously, the sensation of being whole that I had hoped to gain from this token of affection had not been transferred, and, though now capable at least of communication, was left a lost soul, an empty robot with no points of attachment to others. Apparently, the creator of the universe, if there is such a person, had forgotten in his heavy-handedness to allow for the repair of my heart, this machine that hums at much too different a range from everyone else’s to be recognized, let alone heard.

In what seems to be the blatant disregard for my latest melodramatic mood, the sun rises, illuminating with its massive glow the soft curvatures of the ground. With this dramatic change in lighting comes the kind reminder of how, though I have adopted another culture, I will always be indubitably changed by the first. Perhaps the sea and the sand have drifted apart, but they will come together once, twice, forever, because of the memories of when they were one being, in a time long past. For the past influences the present more than one might imagine.

Maybe attachment is not as difficult a subject as I had thought. Maybe I am still attached, maybe tendrils of my spirit are still connected to that place that I had grown up, so long ago. Maybe, rather than complete release, a clean disconnect with the times gone by, the past remains somewhere inside of us, inflating seemingly empty spaces, pulsing with previous consciousnesses, acting as a guiding light.

We do not break from the past: we were broken from the start and sewn up with the collective experiences of life.
The sun does not release the Earth. Forever bound by gravity, the Earth merely endures through another revolution, adding to its history and, with it, the history of mankind.