Inspired by a Desktop Wallpaper

Hands folded behind my head, I lay back in the grass, floating in a haze of pollen that smells like dry hay. Up above, the sky swirls in an afternoon dance of orange and blue, the clouds revealling only a patchy mix of stars.

Peering over me, cutting through my view, the silhouette of power lines draped from one transmission tower to the other. As the wind picks up, the lines sway gently back and forth, trees rustling and depositing their leaves on the ground.

The transmission tower creaks and groans. Looking to my left, safety signs haphazardly stick out of the ground next to the small dirt road. It looks lonely under the long arm of dusk, but they’re the only indication that I am anywhere near civilization. Looking down at my feet, the sun slides down the sky, scattering a band of dusty peach colouring along the horizon.

As the wind dies down, I hear the crunching of footsteps drawing closer. Tilting my head up, I see her. I see her a lot these days. She lays beside me, head back, her black hair creating a halo around her head as she does so.

“What are you doing out here?” She asks, tilting her head towards me.

I smile. She knows why I’m here. While it might not be the exact location, it’s undeniable I was in a place like this all the time as a kid.

“Recapturing my youth,” I say.

She chortles and grows silent, getting drawn back into the rapidly encroaching night sky. I’ve known this girl for a long time now. So why have I been clenching every muscle in my body since the moment she arrived?

“Do you mind that I’m here?” she asks.

Shit.

“Hasn’t bothered me before,” I say, my attempt at nonchalance betrayed by the strain of my words.

“And yet it seems to now. Why is that?” she asks.

I open my mouth to answer, but nothing comes out. I look at the trees, waving to the gentle breeze as if urging me on. I plop my head back on the ground, hitting it a bit harder than I was expecting and rattling my skull.

“You’re trapped,” She says, “Despite seeming to love the present, you seem to get more joy from a simulacrum of the past.”

I keep looking up. I can hear the trees around me bending and groaning in the gust. I know she’s right, but I don’t want to let her see that.

“Why do you seek to recapture a time that is long since gone from this place? Replaying synaptic patterns from far in the past when you were miserable.”

“Because when I do,” I say, propping myself up on my elbow and looking at her, “I get brief flashes of a kind of carefree happiness. A zen-like satisfaction. A feeling of contentment that, despite the misery of my childhood, I get when I return to that younger mind. Is that so bad?” I ask.

She says nothing. I lie back down and marinate in the silence, peering through the kind of dusk air a wind chime should be tinkling away.

“Do you ever think I’ll stop seeing you?” I ask.

“Why would you want to stop?”

“It’s not that I want to stop, but when I see you, you make my nostalgia feel complicated.”

“Well,” she says, now propping herself on her elbow, “That hollowness is there no matter how much you drown it out with videos or games or whatever mindless entertainment you can get your hands on. You throw a tarp on the issue, but it remains there; covered.”

She rose to her feet, taking a moment to close her eyes and breathe in the night ambience. The sun had long since dipped below the horizon, with crickets heralding the coming of the dark.

“It’s complicated whether you want it to be or not, I just let you see the truth. Embrace it, no matter how much it hurts. You’ll feel better in the long run.”

That was all she had to say. I didn’t see her leave. I wasn’t concentrating. For once, I wanted to be in the moment. Even with all its complexities.