22 April 2008
Patchwork Writing on feeling like the Odd One Out
)Published on April 22nd, 2008 @ 10:05:58 pm, using 408 words, 38 views
Who was the first person to repel society instinctively? To lower an arm, receiver on hand in the midst of conversation and take a deep breath. Who first needed such an intermission simply to get through a phone call? Or to sneak through the back door so as not to have to say good morning? To keep people at arm’s length or downright push them away?
What exactly changes from there to here? From the child who stares at anyone and babbles away if they can’t yet speak. The child who will say anything and everything from the moment they learn how, disarming anyone and everyone in the process. The child you yourself used to be. Where exactly does one start and then stop liking people? Closing the circle, reducing the circumference deliberately inch by inch, until eventually there’s room for just a handful of them. When does the great majority of people become foreign to you and you to them?
This flying creature, this vulture soaring above is its own parachute. Enviable flight. Enviable, graceful, nearly slow motion landing. It floats in the air motionless the way I’m only able to stop pedaling my bike and keep it moving for a stretch. It… does it in the air. I can’t help watching it intently and ignoring all surrounding unfeathered forms of life.
It leads this someone to self awareness to be the girl sitting on a sandy beach, camera strapped from shoulder to navel and a black spiral notepad on one hand, pen two-thirds of the way inserted into the spiral. It’s lonely to be the girl who prefers this wind that muffles every other sound to the sizzling midday sun. At once wishing to be taken over by a primal urge to fit in (the reasoning behind that being… eagerness in place, natural alignment would certainly follow) and yet having crossed a line somewhere along the way or rubbed it blurry. Or maybe just having become someone slightly misaligned with the majority.
It’s disheartening to be the person who goes into a shopping center for its benches as though you were looking for the wrong things in the wrong places.
But then again, sometimes the odd one out turns out to be perfect. Or so my favorite photograph tells me…
Photograph by Stewart Osuisu Hirideyo ♥
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Odd one out, society, loner, child, people, foreign, vulture, wind, midday, beach, bench, notepad, parachute
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