But We Emerge: A Scott Foley/Laura Horton Collaboration. Again.

Video by Scott Foley. Words by me!

Visions of ourselves find vigor in the calm of fresh air and fall colors. Enlivened senses stir us from our hiding spots -- inadequate havens in which we shelter ourselves from the malaise of ceaseless motion. Our everyday has left us haggard and barely breathing beneath an ever-growing layer of self-doubt. But we emerge.

When the world outside has become still, and our eyelids are not burdened by the weight of a slumber out-of-reach, we embrace our vitality once more. We find our moment. One moment to quietly reflect. One moment to allow our souls to float along the streams of the westerly winds and hover breathless in rays of afternoon sun.

I fantasize about this kind of paradise – the kind that breathes, the kind that cleanses, the kind that numbs our overheated nerves. I dream it takes our heartbeat back to an un-caffeinated pace and delivers the peace for which we so humbly pray.

Chewing Gum, Infidelity and Idiosyncrasies

Our story has a different taste to me now, something like the faded mint of chewing gum that has been stretched across your tongue too many times. Our visits are shorter, our conversations less interesting. (We've stopped admitting flaws, and I'm not sure what that means). As I sit across from you, your words wash over me like a swarm of insects that I have to wince and dodge my way through, and you are increasingly aware of my discomfort.

We run through the motions of what we once were, occasionally admitting a detail that our current relationship doesn't warrant, but somehow we still feel obligated, like we're committing some kind of infidelity against our former selves by feeling so distant.

Then you sip your drink the same way you always have, and I bring my knees to my chest the same way I always have. We smile. For a moment, I think I still know you the way I've always known you. I could paint the way you tie your shoes, the way you drive, the way you run your fingers through your hair.

But we can't seem to dig ourselves out of the silence.

Electrical Currents and a Lucky Fifty Words

It was something she needed to say, something she should say, and probably, most importantly, something he needed to hear. She knew this. She knew all of this, and so she sat, impatiently clicking her pen as the thoughts traveled in tiny and incomplete electrical currents, readying themselves for her fingers but not yet making any sense. The pad of her thumb cradled the shape of the end of her pen, and as she saw her body adjust to the lag-time, she worried that the words, if they ever came, would be but crude and rehearsed shells of themselves, stumbling along the pale blue line like a wounded animal. She peered to her left toward a pile of scrapped drafts, the words of which were too clichéd and too impersonal, too vague and too elusive, or simply too much, which made them sound insincere even if that was not the case.

She closed her eyes and took a breath and tried to create an image that depicted the emotion, as emotion on its own is not concrete enough to grab hold of a heart and make a difference, but the emotion of present was too overwhelming in its power to force into something so confining as an image. By luck, her mind chose to carry her through her memories, to return her to a place where the words were not so hard to come by, where she feared never gaining in place of fearing loss. It was a much easier place to be because what she feared was what she had, what she knew, and what she wanted is what she had been or at least had hoped to be moving toward. But now she was happy, and what she feared was going back to place she knew to be not as happy. And so the image came.

I picture myself before you as a stool with one leg slightly shorter than the others – a little wobbly, pretty uncomfortable, giving the illusion of balance but never quite achieving it. That means you’re the little wooden wedge that my short leg now rests on. I feel solid with you.

What she said in those words to him meant more than he would know because what she said in an abstract and indirect fifty words could be said more accurately in six: he was a part of her