The Green Sweater

  During those special nights, when my landscape escapes me, I write and write and write.  All the while, I hear the startling sounds; sounds of nature, sounds of a post traumatic trouble, singing like an owl, using her high tower text to screech at the moon river sky above.  Screech after screech after screech, my landscape usually begins somewhere from the beginning, starting in my head and the memories I suppress makes me shiver.  I am a boy, my name is Herman, and ironically, I used to live on Herman Street.  From time to time, I playfully wonder if my parents named me after my childhood block that we all used to call home many years ago... 

            I had made a friend or at least thought everyone who smiled at me could be…so I had made friends with a homeless person, a man of 37 years old…15 years my senior.  The color of water at night turned green and in the summer the man who I had met would sweat a pungent odor that could be smelled to Timbuktu.  I had visited him and brought him pancakes with sweet berries and Chantilly cream in May.  In August, I brought him a notebook to write down his thoughts.  I was sure he had to have some interesting stories for me, for I did not need money or a good time to sustain this friendship.  I would have been happy with his bare, raw imagery, like the dead animals and branches he lived among; the owls still singing, screeching to their young but surely never to be heard by the sun.

            Last Thursday I took a look around my favorite vintage shop and found a really great sweater, a green sweater!  With green being my favorite color and it almost being Halloween, I decided to name it “Green-Witch.”  I layered my clothes that day; I wore a long sleeve shirt underneath my new green sweater.   The day was October 26 and the weather had just started to turn its back on us.  I had decided to would again visit my friend.  I brought some paint, canvas and a brush; I had wanted to paint. 

The day was overgrown with olive satin moss lined upon the bricks over the albatross.  I wanted this man to wear my sweater! After all, green was my favorite color and to share, even better! I painted and drew, while he watched and wrote.  We heard the buses breaks and felt the city’s skyscraping aches’.  My landscape was coming to life, the very one in my head that would play with my mind, and then escape within time.  I left him with my green sweater, and I left with my longed sleeve sheath, covering my limbs, similar to the long sleeved moss that enveloped the branches that lay over the gravel.

Reviews

[DiMar4u]

I think what I like most about this piece is that it encourages my imagination to wander. It's as if the snap shot of your characters psyche provokes me to suppose what the rest of his life might be like. All the days before and all the days after. In a way, drinking the character in and letting myself become intoxicated by his world view. Thank you for sharing this piece. I enjoyed reading it.