The Dome

The Dome

The grass is wet, long, it streaks smoothly against her calves, clinging as she continues to walk. A million capsules of dew hanging precariously off the slender elongated strands. Unbeknownst to her, some fall melt into the already sodden ground. They no longer occupied their unstable and insecure existence on the edge; they became unified with the environment as a whole. They are unlike her as she still clings to distinction and division, to herself. The night is so dark and the space is so wide, it as if the sky curves to meet the horizon line, the edges in the field in which she walks. A barely discernable line at the front of her vision marks the elusive boundary where space meets solidity. Darkness holds more silence than light and in the distance the laughter of her friends seems louder than it should. They circle a fire orange sparks sprinkle the air around them. She hugs her coat closer, quickening her step now as the previously star lit sky is blighted by clouds moving in from somewhere behind her. She feels the packets in her pockets shift against her thigh due to the added pace. She thinks of them now, their round white forms, the physicality of something that holds feeling. She lets her eyes rest on the edges of the surroundings before letting them travel up on the curve of the sky. A sudden discomfort arises in her, the way the space stretched so far and the sky reached to meet it was almost dome like. The clouds now seemed to roll and gather, a deep roll of thunder reverberated around her; the rain fell hitting her face, sliding and trickling down her coat. She was frozen now, trapped in her thoughts, watching her friends far away. Making movements suggesting the lowering of heads, pulling up of hoods, gathering closer together. They seemed so utterly separate to her now. Her breath was coming shorter as she struggled to think. What was wrong? Suffocation moves in and she feels trapped as if she were in a real dome. She imagines a hand encircling her whole surroundings, her entire perception at that moment until the rain falls and her head trembles unearthing memories untouched, memories never remembered, whatever it is that comes before a memory stirs. The walls of her skull quake and memories are born.

When her dad came back he gave her a snow globe. She sat it on its base of plastic, on the locker beside her bed. The plastic swans gazed out solemnly from their small world, resting on a mirror to appear as if floating on a small lake. She tapped the glass and wondered if they could see her, wondered if they could see the line that prevented them from escaping. Her small hands would lift it, tip and watch as the glitter softly settled on the heads of the swans and their surroundings. A little world, immutable, unchanging, immune to the effects of time itself. Unfortunately her mother was not immune to the effects of time and as time passed all it came to symbolise was the length of the father’s absence. Innocent to the ‘shoulds’ and the ‘hows’ of living, forgiveness was not even needed for her fathers disappearance as constant discovery was how she lived her life, his departure and return was hardly significant in the rich patch work of experience she was creating for herself. It only took its place among other notable discoveries such as chewing colouring pencils would give you a beautiful rainbow coloured mouth. This was starkly different for her mother where she had one frayed thread, her mother experienced a huge tear, a gaping hole, and one, which could not be filled or forgiven by a snow globe. So they moved. School was a vastly different place from home. Home was freedom. In the evenings she would find herself in the fields. There were no boundaries, there was light and dark but no time. She would always inevitably return to her mother, to stories and comfort and sleep and awake to find the prospect of a new to even further her explorations. In nature the lines were not wholly apparent, shapes were misshapen organic, and blurred but in school there were lines everywhere. You must stand in a line before entering the classroom, you must write between the lines and colour inside them, even the chalked markings of hopscotch represented structure that was unknown to her. the trouble started around five, at a time of growth and absorption. She was a child of trouble the teachers said. Her upbringing was totally wrong they said. She should be taught discipline they said. She would be forced to the front of the classroom, small and meek below a stern gaze to explain, drawing on the walls or not coming in when the bell rang among other things. She would return home daily in storms. Inside confusion brewed that she was incapable of expressing. Why were there certain things we had to do in the first place, where did rules start and end? As she grew older she still sought the comforting solace of open space but one day as she gazed at the horizon a decisive shift occurred in her very self. As she looked out into the distance, discomfort arose, the same discomfort and from the same source that would later force her to remember this moment in the future. Too young to wrestle, to reason with emotion, she only felt an overwhelming suffocation. If she had been able to find the words she would have said she felt trapped, that in place of space and solace boundaries still existed. She would have said that in that moment the lack of control she had became apparent, that she felt the world surrounding her, even in nature was trying to impose limits on her. It was at this point that she began to desperately yearn to escape. She would have said it reminded her of a snow globe, surrounded, trapped characters unable to see beyond and there was always a beyond, even beyond beyond, subjected to the fate of others commands but instead she was unable to express any of this, she only felt something shift, something change like the wind as it rustled through the nearby trees shaking the branches and letting droplets plummet to the ground.

And so anger grew within, boiled and bubbled from the source of the discomfort. She couldn’t explain what she had felt in that moment and she had no direction in which to place it. Soon it took on a life of its own, garnering a path from outside experience, the influences in which she had grown up with, direct example. Why had her mother felt angry? She answered that question herself and in doing so found her anger direction. The small hands which joyfully accepted a gift all forgiving and completely unawares and innocent of the context in which it was given now gripped that same gift with an intensity which made her knuckles pale. Emotion can be so powerful, it was separate itself from consciousness as if it is a separate entity, broken free, released from a cage and not of ourselves. In this way anger blinds and she is unable to remember how those hands moved, what thoughts ran through her mind, she can only see smashed fragments of glass, a silver sparkly stream of water dissipating through the wood grains staining them darker and the intense flecks of red, their warmth present on her hands, her cheeks damp with tears. The eye of the forever silent swan gazing up at her. A swan who had escaped the place in which it was trapped, something she herself felt would never happen to her.

But now she felt the world quaking just as that swans must’ve. She looked at the sky imagining huge cracks running through it as if it were broken glass. Beyond the hedgerow a car stopped. She heard the door slam, footsteps on the tarmac. She saw her friends silhouettes moving, smoke spiralling through the air, heard hissing as the fire quenched from the rain and stamping feet. The orange of the fire, their forms against the black night reminded her of the melting malleable colours that seep in between your eyelids when your half way between sleep and wake. Now they had spotted her, gesturing, calling wildly, running hoods pulled up, backs bent. She was trapped in her thoughts, somewhere a voice urged her to move to run after them but in her a deeper sense felt calm, devoid of urgency. She looked at the curve of the sky, seeing it now just as the sky rather than a dome, a wall, a barrier. How had she felt these things? How had she carried this anger? She was never trapped by the world, for she had given names to things, she had called the sky a dome. She was trapped by herself. She let her hands rest on the ziplock bags in her pockets, she had no need to escape now. She used to be so sure but now she didn’t know what she was escaping from so she let them fall into the long grass. She was aware of the flashlight walking towards her, details emerging from the shadows. She was used to authoritative demanding voice that now ordered her to stay still. Somehow she felt choice in that order, before it was pure order, stay still, therefore she must bolt but now it was choice, she could remain or she could flee. She felt her life suspended, frozen in animation. She felt as a drop of dew as it precariously holds to a blade of grass, clinging to the unstable life it had lived while a new weight pulled it down.