You Think That I Don't Even Mean A Single Word I Say, It's Only Words, And Words Are All I Have, To Take Your Heart Away

--"Words", The Bee Gees

"Are you sure you don't mind me telling you this, sugar?" you ask the passenger sitting next to you. You throw in a little 'ole laugh because you don't know what else to do and, frankly, you need the respite from talking so heavily and for so long. A small part of you wishes that he would just tell you to shush up because you know you don't have any business talking his ear off. Perhaps then you'd have the time to pool your thoughts rather than let them spill over like water going over the riverbank. But you know you, there ain't a snow's chance in hell that you can end the story here.

When he reluctantly nods with that glazed look over his eyes you push on.

"There used to be this swimming hole real close to my folks' home that all the kids would flock to on a blistery summer day. I used to love those days--not a care in the world except how long it would be before your mother would call you home for supper. How I used to love getting my face went. You can't go swimming without getting your face wet, as my daddy always says. I would end up swimming for hours with everyone, splashing around, horsing around, and plain 'ole having fun till one by one they would all eventually end up going back to their respective homes. Fairly soon it would just be me and my best friend at the time, Torry. She would tarry for a bit, maybe an hour or so, and then it would just be me swimming around that blessed spring till it got too dark for me to swim.

"You would think a girl swimming by herself into all hours of the night would be a mite frightening. But you know what? I never once did get scared by being my lonesome. I never once did get to running for home when I heard the slightest whistle or strange noise in the growth around the hole. Hell's bells, that wasn't my first thought. I was just so happy to have such a kingly spot to myself that my only thoughts were of how long I could keep it as such. I was more fretful over having to share it again than someone absconding away with me, you know?

"But eventually my day would come to a close and like the cows coming home by moonlight even I would trundle off to the house with the biggest of grins on my face. Yeah, I'd be sore--every muscle would be aching like a bee's bath--but I had the still-fresh memories of twirling about in the water without benefit of an audience to keep my spirits up. The time with friends was a joy and all, but nothing quite beat that time alone... out of the house... out of my own head... out of everyone's thought.

"That's a bit what this plane ride home resembles. It's a bit like coming home after I've gone swimming for a spell on my own."

You don't know if he understands that was your point the entire time. It was, but for you half of the fun was always less about where you're getting to and more about you got to getting there in the first place. The way you reckon it, everyone has to be a certain place at a certain time in their life--school, work, dating, marriage--that's all pre-ordained. The way you get there, though, well that right there is the fun part. Getting to where you need to go is the hoot-and-a-hoof that makes all the rest of it livable. As you mentioned to him, you were expected home on all those swimming excursions and that's, of course, where you eventually ended up, but you did it on your schedule and you sure as sunshine did it in your own way.

"So I take it you're glad to be going home?" he asks you, leaning over the aisle that divides you on the plane.

"I'm more glad at what I'm leaving than what I'm arriving at, you know? I left in damn fine spirits and all I have to look forward is starting the next chapter of my life. Well, I say, what's wrong with wanting to reread a smidgen of the chapter I just read? Ain't nothing wrong with that in the least by my accounting."

The perplexed expression on his face tells you that you're latest tangent might have derailed your lovely companion's understanding a trifle too much. You set about to rectifying this little 'ole matter.

"College. That's all I have to look forward to once I get home."

Your row mate again nods his head in eventual recognition of your point.

"I had a wonderful week. I visited California for the second time. I got to spend time with my best friend. But I also had plenty of perfect moments that were just mine for the having. I can tell you that out West they keep a beautiful sunset. When I saw that orange sky streaking across the water with this almost lullaby-stillness to the air, that was almost enough to convince me that in California was where I belonged. How can someone resist wanting to see vistas like that everyday? It was like watching God painting a picture before my very eyes. It was very inspiring.

"And there were other moments too. Driving up the coast while letting my friend sleep in the passenger seat there'd be stretches of highway where I wouldn't see a solitary car for tens of miles. I'd think to myself that it was almost like traveling in a time machine to a time where the land wasn't spoiled with house and such. I'd get to thinking this must have been what it was like to have your nearest neighbor be almost a hour's drive by buggy. That would get me to thinking that I was driving a buggy and other silliness like that. Suddenly, all the trees would be the trees that my kinfolk used to drive. I would no longer be in Oregon or Washington, or wherever we were at the time. I'd be back in Georgia and I'd attempt to get in the mindset of these ancient settlers. What it was like to be encroached by so much wilderness, to fear (or not fear) the wildness of the world around me, and I would start thinking to myself that those were the kind of lessons that should be important to me--self-sufficiency, dependence on the land to survive, thriving in the maw of adversity--not the stodgy schoolbook teachings of a place of brick and mortar.

"Do you know what I mean? There I was, Breannie Oakley, queen of the wild frontier and I had all these voices in my head telling me that all of it would be ending soon. Eventually I'd be on my way home to come face-to-face with four more years of schooling and four more years where I wouldn't be able to come out and see the sights that I hadn't seen before. Well, hell's bells, that didn't seem like a fair bargain. Why did I have to trade four of my good years for an education that for all I knew I didn't need anyway.

"It's not like I wasn't an intelligent creature. I know how to do the learning thing, thank you very much, but being out there without anybody telling me what was best for me got me to do a little prioritizing. How much school did I really need anyway? How much until I was set for the world I was creating for myself? When would I reach that point that enough was enough? I'm not begrudging all those who have the capacity to be lifelong students. We're all lifelong students in a sense, but my school seemed less to be the building kind and more the world-at-large kind.

"You could say I was in a crisis of faith, you could."

At that moment you got up out of your seat, much to the surprise of your faithful listener. He looked rather cute in his puppy-dog way, but at the moment you felt the spotlight pointed at you and it's blinding light made it difficult to see who all was in your audience. It didn't matter that your audience was an audience of one, when the light's upon you then's not the time to get to know every Joe Schmoe. Performances only linger if there's a clear delineation between performer and performed to. Stories only get remembered if there's one person telling and one person listening. And words?

Words are only effective in unison and lose their effectiveness once they're stilted and broken up. Keep them in suspense, that's the key.

"I gotta go pee," you giggle to him as you make your way to the back of the plane.

When you get back to your seat, the guy across from you seems to have waited patiently for your return. You see him try to not to ask you to continue, but eventually the dead silence on your part has made him twitchier than a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. You had every intention of finishing out your tale of crisis. You'd only stopped to collect your thought for a bit, but when the fans demand attention, then by golly, you must give it to them.

'Here's what I was thinking, true or not true. All I'd be doing in school would be to hearing professors talking about all the things that I needed to know. All I'd be doing in school would be reading books about topics that I should learn in my life. All I'd be doing would be absorbing knowledge piece by piece, word by word. Now I ask you, if everything I'd be learning could be broken down into words then why couldn't I be the one breaking them down for little 'ole me. Why did I need someone else doing the parsing for me? That's a little like having someone cut up my food for me in my honest opinion. No, I got to thinking that there's a lot to this world that I was curious about and that there was a whole sled's worth of stuff that I wanted to figure out on my own without anyone's help. Who cares if after all my deliberating I came to the wrong conclusions or the conclusions not firmly met by the so-called experts? All of them all could go to Hell in a handbasket for all I cared in that moment. If it's all words, then I wanted to be the one who came up with them in my own time and in my own way.

"It's like telling a story. Everybody has their own ideas on how to do it right. Some like to put this bit here or that bit there, but only you can tell the story how you like to tell it. So long as it gets told and is entertaining I don't see the jollies in instructing someone on how to do it right, what words I should've used, or what sort of pacing would have made it punchier. It's my blazing story and I'll tell it any way I want. Please, thank you.

"I'll use whatever words I want and I want to tell it in a fashion that makes sense to me. Not every story needs to be what you call complete... and my story, for worse or for better, changes as often as the weather depending the mood I'm in. I don't think it'll ever have a proper ending. And who needs a proper ending at any rate?

"I'm not saying I don't want to go to college. I'm saying I'm not positive it's going to be as rewarding education-wise as I once thought it was going to be. I'm sure I'm going to meet all these wonderful people and leave all sorts of wickedness as my legacy, but, darling, I'm unconvinced that there's anything I could learn in books that I can't learn from real life, you know?

"You could say I'm afraid that this last trip of mine to see the world on my own was like going to that swimming hole, and I'm just afraid by going home this time it'll be the last time I see that swimming hole ever again."

Breanne