For the Elements of Nature Contest.
He paced. Every once in a while, he would stop, slump over the table, supported by his locked elbows, staring down at an empty tabletop. Blink, mutter, blink, what was he forgetting? Close your eyes, block the rest out. Tease it out of that dark recess. Forgetting, forgetting, what was it, what was he forgetting? Damnit if he knew. Exasperated, he growled, and began to pace again.
He felt as if he had left something undone. What, he did not know. It sat at the back of his mind, tugging at his metaphorical sleeve. "Hey, mister, you're forgetting something. Mister? It's important!" Why it took the mental image of a young child, he had no idea. But when he tried to see it, this is what he saw. "You have to remember, mister! It's important!" Damned child had at least the repetition of propaganda down.
He had spent the previous night doing what? Denying himself sleep for the words printed so faithfully to the pages of a book; what kind of man still held such revelry, such awe, such unimaginable love of literature at his age? He knew the answer: him.
So he had tried to sleep early today. And yet, he couldn't. By all rights, he should be exhausted. He felt it there, the familiar sleepy dragon, curled up the the base of his skull, where it met the spine, growing heavier for all the time it went unheeded. He was a creature of late nights--long since had he forced the need for sleep to nothing more than that dull presence at the very back of his mind. That very slow, ever-present remonstrance. It was there. So he should sleep. Shouldn't he?
And yet! Awake he lay, unable to take solace either in the warmth of sleep, or the escape of the words he held dearly. The ceiling above his bed. Such a lovely shade of white. Would that be a shade? What do you call varying forms of white? By no means were they shady. "Mister!"
What! What the hell do you want!
"You're forgetting something!"
You've told me!
He cut off the mental repartee. As if that proved he were sane, arguing with himself.
Perhaps his work ethic was rebelling at the idea that he would waste the day without accomplishing anything important. Ha. He scoffed at that thought. As if he had ever had that kind of motivation. Certainly he shunned sleep--with a tad of disdain--quite often, but this was usually to finish reading some obscure, short, and deliciously tricky philosophical manuscript. That couldn't be it. Or could it?
What had he to do? Did he remember to pay the bills? Yes. Do the laundry? Yes. He ran through the mental checklist of tasks which he knew were for too unimportant and mundane for him truly to be bothered by. Surely, yes, they were things one would do well to remember, but he had always been told his head was in the clouds, so his priorities were obviously elsewhere. It had to be something very important to him to cause this assault on his freedom of mind. He could think of nothing.
With that, he felt the quiet urge to get out, to run away. It was dark. . .cold. . .enveloping. Perfect. He wished to expatriate from this bothersome world which would not leave him be, and be swallowed up by the sentinels of the forest. Walk step by step, feel the wonderful kiss of the chill on his face. Perhaps it would be a powerful night, where the wind gusted and blasted his clothing around him, and yet he would love it all the more for the feeling it inspired. The vigor of it. He almost went.
As soon as his feet hit the carpet, however, a thought occurred to him: what if that was the intention behind the nagging all along?
Suddenly the world warped around this idea. The fact that it had been sent so subtly, only after he had exhausted his list of what he needed to do a hundred times over. This was only further proof of a very cunning attempt to draw him outside. It seemed so soft and beautiful an orchestration, for a moment he could fathom nothing else.
No! His logic rebelled with a will: you have an overactive imagination! Where do you get some of this stuff? What's out there? Monsters? UFOs? Your ex wife? He shuddered at the last. These are silly thoughts, his reason told him, with no basis in reality. You're too tired to know what you're thinking. Get some sleep and ignore this nonsense. Don't even acknowledge the existence of such logical fallacy by going outside to challenge it.
He did as he was told.
And yet! What do you call a shade of white? Perhaps the relief caused by the sponged mottling should be taken as color, rather than texture. He screwed up his eyes attempting to unify the image into one gray view.
"Mister! You're really forgetting something very important, mister!"
Screw it.
He dressed lightly, jeans and a tee, even in the state of light winter which currently enthralled the earth. The questing coolness found its way up his sleeves, causing the clothing to billow around him slightly. His old lover caressed his body with adoration: he was her most devoted child. A child of cold, who walked in the winter and smiled at the tautness of the skin it caused and the sharpness of the eye it pervaded. He breathed in deep the smell of the season, and loved it.
And then he set off. He jogged lightly, testing the balls of his feet to find a rhythm. He acquired it, and slipped seamlessly into the repetitive movements. His breath drew in, pushed out, lungs laboring smoothly and silently, supplying oxygen to the rest of his body. His tongue subconsciously curled up to filter the air past the warm muscle. All of this was nothing he had not done a hundred times before.
He lived out of town, next to a copse of trees that leaned somewhat threateningly over his small but cozy home. While he had grown to love these as his connection to nature--the guardian force which stood over him at night--these were not the trunks he was looking for. Several hundred yards away, the real treeline started. It was for this that he headed.
The winter was early yet, and the first snow had yet to fall. But even as he trotted, the first snowflake he had seen this year drifted to the ground before his eyes, and was soon left behind. He almost stopped to watch it stick to the frosted grass, but it was only the beginning of the storm. Soon, all about him, the snow fell slowly down in big, fat flakes, looking for all the world like the stars strewn across the sky were finding their way to earth, meandering about the familiar landscape they had watched and been watched from for an eternity. He felt one tickle his eyelash, and blinked, and relished the kiss of each as it touched his skin and melted to minute droplets, their lips as sweet as winter personified, but instantly extinguished. They expended the entirety of their being in one portion of a second, so short as to be inestimable by human mentalities.
Was this what he had come to see? No, surely not. He saw snow all the time, and while it never lost its charm, the novelty of it had ceased long ago. The first snow was something he could cherish, but he was still jogging, and had no intention or motivation to cease.
He caught up with the treeline, which seemed to sway and drift against the constantly moving reference points, and suddenly he was among the trunks. Near the edge, here, they were relatively sparse. As he passed each one, he reached out to tap it with a bare hand and depart a bit of his warmth. Soon he was moving amongst relatively constricted growth. Nevertheless, he dodged each one, the cold spreading slowly into his fingertips as they deposited a kernel of heat from the winter runner. He was an emissary of earth's dominant species, that swaggered on two legs and so often took what was not its own. This was his personal gift, given to each as much to feel in contact with them as anything else, but that made it no less of a gift; the trees would not begrudge the brush of the mind of one so steeped in the love of winter.
And then they changed, growing rougher, thicker. . .ancient. And then they ended. He stopped. By all rights, this tract of woods led to no great forest, but only to an interstate highway which marked the encroachment of humanity. Long ago he should have heard the sounds of speeding vehicles. But it was silent. And the view around him, he could not quite believe.
His logic died. It rolled over, exposing its underbelly, and conceded victory. The slumbering dragon of exhaustion stirred quietly as yet another rose to the surface, clawing its way from an even deeper recess he had not known he possessed. The pockets of the mind were surely multitudinous in nature.
The ascending dragon let forth a burst of icy fire, and his mind bloomed with knowledge. With each gift to the forest, he had given a little of himself, and had a little more returned, silently, beneath the surface. Only when it was whole did it spring forth from hiding.
"I told you, mister." The winter god smiled at the familiar voice as a lusciously bitter draft tousled his hair. "You forgot something awful important!"
His imagination, in retrospect, seemed terribly inactive.
It could have just been expanded more!