Aura – Emma Pate

 in Staff Perspectives
  1. Inspiration is as fickle as ancient religion. It finds you through cracks in pavement and fluorescent gas station lights and thick humid wind in the night. You are a lone priest reaching out to muster it, but it only finds you by surprise.
  2. You are swept up in a film, one with the ocean swaying blue, the moonlight flickering in the waves. A choir of children’s singing relents to the sound of a busy pier with ringing games, the tall structures casting yellowed light onto the wooden docks. Underneath it all a lifeblood pulses, predators stalking on hot smoking bikes behind corners, waiting to come out and puncture warm necks. This spirit enters you and you find your appetite, finishing your dining hall meal for the first time this year. You lick the thin butter off the plastic. You look out into the black night above the hills, through the window. You see the road stretching west and stare at the green sign above it, and wait for the roar of bikes. You have always been waiting to go home.
  3. The living room of your childhood home stretches up all the way to the second floor roof. The open doorway leads to the dark kitchen, scattered with garbage and boxes, empty cans sitting on the granite counter glinting in the TV light. Three rectangles stand next to each other at the top of the living room wall, windows into the blue night. This is the room where you remember how to love your mother. On the large TV you enter the same worlds together and sit on the opposite sides of the couch. She passes her childhood to you with the screen, and you let her into yours. A portal open in the late hours of the night. This is the only reason you visit. 
  4. The winter storm brought something with it. In the air some sort of disease from animal excrement, infecting your breath and working itself into your blood and brain. The dusty western on the TV is bright and fuzzy, and as the snow sits brightly outside your vision gets vivid and your body feels alive. You see his face this time. It’s brighter than before. You wonder how you didn’t notice before, how his face is the only one you can remember, how his voice makes all the others sound the same. 
  5. It is nostalgia for things you never had. He feels like a family member from a fleeting infantile memory. His words are easy to consume and his face looks like no other face. It must be talent like nothing else, because every character he assumes lives inside you after the run time. It feels realer than things you remember last week, it means more to you than the things that are supposed to.
  6. Now, you always have something to do. 
  7. Now, you have forty-two beats to learn how to be alive.
  8. The yellow light of the shower in the morning illuminated the tiles as you receive visions of the future, steam clouding your lungs and softening your skin. You breathe out through your teeth, small-set and yellow, delicate and bulkier as they go back. Your lips thin like his, your hair long dark, brushing your shoulder blades. Your feet too small for your frame and fat sitting comfortably beneath your blemished skin to insulate you. Yours and his are the only unique bodies.
  9. They served your favorite meal at the dining hall. You leave it half finished, feeling like you know so much. You smell sunscreen in the air when you walk outside. Everything about today is an inside joke and you comprehend just enough to get them. Today you are leaving early. You notice everything, you glance at everyone with no animosity. Today you will go missing. You walk up the steps baking under the sun and feel the wind. You are happy.
  10. You wake in your own bed and this feels very wrong. You download California Psychics on your phone. There is no ground beneath you when you jump; you are stolen from by 180 dollars. You leave your bed and miss class to shower in the dark. You sit naked in the stall, the wall cool and slimy, warmness pooling around you. The only figures you can make out are the two lilac bottles, standing like pillars through the darkness as they watch you dying. You ask, in the dark, for something to replace what you have lost. There is nothing. The pillars observe and hold their response.
  11. There was an essay to be written in the final week for your eight PM class. The ideas always come to you in the first two weeks and you nurse them like fat-growing vegetables over the semester. In this case, you picked very early the film you would unfold, and on this mild cloudy dawn you . There is blood and liver as you dissect the moving image on your word processor. Its soul became bared to you and you record it on the page, chasing it, flexing familiar muscles only activated in this rare state. Like instinct, like hunting, like being chosen. The writing of an essay is like a final act. You are more yourself in these moments than anywhere else, your soul moves through you and becomes briefly expressed. The final paragraph resounds in your chest. In this brief and messy clarity, you feel your eternal home.