11/1/23
Willa Schendler
I’m walking on the sidewalk downtown in the Springs and it’s a perfect winter day, so crisp and
cold the lightness feels lonely.
I wore my Doc Martens too much last week because they make me feel hot. Now my achilles
tendon hurts from my foot rubbing against the hard black leather walking from my apartment to
class.
I am walking and my heel aches, and I remember a couple weeks ago when it didn’t hurt like
this. I swear I can feel the sinews in the tendon creaking as my foot pushes off the wide
sidewalk concrete. Unlike Achilles, though, I am fragile in more places than this.
Driving back to school the sunlight is the amber of an early winter evening even though it is only
November.
I am listening to a CD. My dad made it for my mom when she was pregnant with me – he wrote
“Ellen’s Baby Mix” on the yellow disc. The first song skips, the CD is scratched.
I wish I had thought to write down what the songs on the CD were before I scratched it, but my
little red notebook I’m supposed to record the world in is now full of days and days of unfinished
To-Do lists. I recycle tasks, ones I can’t seem to finish. The boxes I write next to them are empty,
they remind me of my little endless failures.
The songs that don’t skip remind me of growing up, of the feeling of flushed cheeks after school
in our house by the woodstove. I’d sit there with my dad nauseatingly anxious about college
applications, and we would drink strong coffee and write together.
In the background is the rhythmic knead of the bread machine my dad bought to save money. It
turned out we didn’t replace store bought bread with homemade bread, we just ate two times as
much bread. The bread machine bread is dense and sweet, it is good with honey.
At least, I want those songs to remind me of this. Driving in the amber light that I know I love I
don’t feel anything.
I am walking on the concrete in Colorado Springs. Someone pointed out to me how comically
small the bell is in the bell tower on Kiowa. My camera roll is full of pictures of the street in front
of the court house – it is beautiful, or I try to convince myself that it is. Look at it in spring, in fall,
in winter. I am in this place watching it change, I am learning about it. I stay the same. I like the
early evening glow off the brutalist buildings, the odd names of the shows advertised above the
theater. I should go to more of those types of things.
My achilles tendon aches when I walk, and I remember a conversation. Fiona asked if I ever
thought about dying. Because she didn’t. She felt, she told me breathlessly, on a run above my
house, invincible. We haven’t spoken in a year.
I think about dying all the time. I do not want to die, but I think about the fact of it. What would it
mean to never see another winter day, or drive in the soft light of early evening. It is nice that
these cold days don’t depend on my being there to notice them.