As for forever… I have lived it.

Only ever lonely and alone,

trapped outside a memory,

L O O K I N G

by Nathaniel edward Briner

It’s dark.

Too dark to tell where I am,

if I am anywhere at all.

The absence of light makes me feel as if I am nowhere,

but somehow I feel alive in this dark abyss,

concealed from the good of day.

Perhaps my mind has awoken from a thoughtless dream

while my body remains numb.

Either that, or I am falling into a deep sleep

and have yet to enter a dream.

A SOUND.

Heartfelt, just outside my shadowy hollow.

The sound belongs to a child, her audible joy

echoing through this barrier that conceals me,

warming this mystery with an invisible light.

I must be entering a dream.

“Is it working?” Joslyn was giggling with excitement.

Mom continued to toy with the camera, eagerly looking inside.

She answered, with one eye squinting: “The red light is on, but I’m not seeing anything...”

“Lens cap.” I was sulking in the sofa nearby.

She removed the lens cap, only to see my smiling little sister peeking in from the other side.

BLINDING LIGHT.

So powerful and unexpected,

I am thrown back towards the dying dark.

Before I know it, light is everywhere,

and I can’t tell whether I am being saved or vanquished.

Still, I appear to remain,

and decide to get back on my feet.

I rise to find myself in a new and unfamiliar place.

In front of me is a massive window.

I appear to be in a room, looking in to a larger room.

In that larger room, looking in on me, is a towering little girl.

“CAN YOU SEE ME, MOM?” Exclaimed my sister, thinking that raising her voice could solve the problem.

“I can see you sweetie!” responded Mom with a higher pitch in her voice. She liked to talk to Joslyn with this goofy voice. With the camera in her hand, she must have felt obliged to narrate.

“It’s Christmas morning, December 25th, 1998, and we are all having a wonderful morning here in Ohio, aren’t we Joslyn?”

“YES WE ARE!” Joslyn bounced on the sofa, tediously reaching her arms towards the camera with that smirk on her face.

“Aren’t we Chris!” she pointed the camera towards me as Joslyn continued to frolic on the couch.

“You know Mom, everyone knows what day Christmas is. You don’t have to tell them.” I responded swiftly.

She was being redundant, a word that I had missed on my vocab test just before break. This redundancy annoyed me, so I decided to respond as a “smart-ass”, a phrase I had learned in the lunchroom a few days before.

“Besides, it says the date on the tape!” I knew this because I had a camera, but today I wasn’t in the mood for filming.

“Same old Chris,” she said as she moved the camera along.

“But Joslyn has some exciting news. Joslyn, show us your teeth!” Joslyn’s attention was directed back to the camera and she gave a huge smile, revealing a dark spot among her small pearly whites.

“I lost a TOOF!” belted Joslyn to the camera, slipping her tongue in and out of the crevasse. “I lost a toof, and it didn’t even hurt one bit!”

“You sure did Joslyn!” There was that bothersome voice again. “Why don’t you give a tour of the house sweetie pie! Here, hold it like this and show him around.”

I am being swept from room to room,

with no control over where I go.

Over couches and under tables, I am effortlessly flying.

Along the patterned carpets and checkered walls

I glide until I make a sharp turn in any direction.

Up, down, left, right,

I am shaken and tossed about.

With this little girl as my guide,

I am forced to observe this tangible world through her eyes.

She leads me through a jungle of stainless steel and shag carpet,

of tiled floors and wooden doors.

I place my open hands and face upon the glass,

looking in to this separate world.

I wish the barrier between us would just break.

Mom sat beside me after Joslyn pranced away with her new camera. I could hardly look at her as she began to speak. “You looked just like that when your Dad first gave you your camera.”

“Don’t talk to me with that stupid voice!” I added with rolling eyes, desperately trying to fight off any sentimental talk. “You always talk like that, it’s so...demeaning!”

“Look at me Chris,” she added with sincerity. I turned my head towards her voice.

“I know. I hated sharing things with your Aunt Linda, but it’s just part of life. You get over it. Besides, think about how much you love using your camera.” She pointed right at me, as if I was having trouble understanding who she was talking about. “Don’t you think your little sister should have a chance to love one?” She was looking at me straight in the eyes now, and by then I knew I had lost the battle.

“Great!” I thought to myself as I stormed to my room, a defeated man. “My life is over! Might as well call her Chris and give her my room while you’re at Mom!”

I contemplated packing my bags when I heard a light knock on my door.

“Can we come in?”

It was Joslyn’s voice. Mom was probably using her innocence to invade my personal abode.

“Whatever,” I muttered.

Surprisingly, they heard me, and the door squeaked open.

But there was no “we”. It was just Joslyn and her dumb camera.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“I’m still giving Sunny the tour,” She whispered loudly in my direction, one hand cuffed around her mouth.

“What?” I asked.

She lifted the camera up slightly while still pointing it at me.

“That’s a camera, Joslyn. It doesn’t need a name!”

“Mom told me to give him a tour of the house, and everyone needs a name Chris!” I hated arguing with a preschooler.

“I didn’t name mine, so you don’t get to name yours.” I stated, thinking the conversation was over.

“I didn’t name him! His name is right here!” She pointed towards the side of the camera. I shuffled over and read the label, laughing a little inside.

“That says S-O-N-Y, Joslyn, not S-U-N-N-Y.” Maybe talking funny was the only way of communicating with her.

With a new name, my prison feels so much warmer.

I begin to feel apart of something way beyond my reach.

Her sweet voice soothes all my pain.

She introduces me to her world

(which is almost entirely made up of stuffed bears and elephants)

and she reads to them and me constantly.

Sometimes she looks out into my world,

and sees me looking into to hers.

She is the only one that doesn’t seem to see straight through me.

I wonder what she sees.

My sister’s delusion only got worse.

Thanks to Mom’s encouragement, S-U-N-N-Y was practically adopted into the family. He joined us for dinner and followed us in and out of the house. His favorite pastimes were draining our supply of tapes and occupying our most convenient outlets. He constantly glared at us like a lifeless object (which he was), and he loved to make my sister scream in agony by flashing a “low battery” sign every so often. I just loved my new brother.

For the sake of my sister’s sanity, I decided I would take matters into my own hands. It was clear to me that I had to kill this Sunny.

The date on the corner of my window reminds me

I have been trapped for a long time.

Yet, for most of this time, I have had a family.

Joslyn’s childhood antics have become somewhat of an irritation, but who am I to complain?

At least I have company.

I have followed my new family on many adventures,

and I have witnessed them each grow ever so slightly.

It has been quite something.

I have prayed with them before every meal,

and I have laughed with them after every joke.

I watched them have good days and bad days,

and I have cried with Joslyn when she shares her struggles.

Her tooth has grown back,

and I couldn’t be happier for her.

I couldn’t be happier.

It was a brisk autumn afternoon, and I was up in the tree house thinking about a movie I should make. My camera was in hand (it still had no name), and I was desperately trying to use it. I would constantly turn it on and peer inside, but I would always see nothing. I hated filming nothing, so I never pressed “record”. The same blank tape had been in my nameless camera for seven months.

I was deep in thought when I heard Joslyn calling from below: “Can we come up?”

“I don’t know, can you?”

“I don’t know. Can we?”

“Whatever,” I muttered.

As she made here way up, I considered climbing down to go inside when it dawned on me that it was the perfect time for the kill.

We sat up there in an awkward silence for a while. It took me a second, but once I had a plan, I decided to execute.

“Can I hold Sunny for a little bit?” I asked politely.

“Yes, but be careful. Sunny is very afraid of heights.” She reminded me of this with a sickening amount of sincerity.

Once Sunny was in my hands, I moved on with my plan, and walked to the edge of the tree house. I reached out my arm and let the stupid thing fall.

I heard Joslyn gasp behind me. I turned around and was welcomed by the most flabbergasted expression I had ever seen. She was dead still on her tiptoes, her lungs suspended in mid air with her mouth wide open, and her eyes pressed deep into mine with an unavoidable trance. Her expression clearly emitted a sense of bewilderment and despair, but she was frozen stiff, and could only be thawed by my explanation.

“That’s called an aerial shot,” I explained. The plan seemed so much better in my head.

Everything is spinning.

The trees in the distance are turning upon themselves,

and the sky is switching places with the earth.

The leaves above are getting smaller, unlike the leaves below.

My heart is racing, but everything outside seems to be moving slower now.

The earth is charging at me, perhaps to break me out.

Please break me out.

And then the darkness returns,

and I have been betrayed.

“You SHOT HIM?” Shouted my sister, clearly confused by my terrible explanation.

Before I could respond, she was somehow down the tree. With the victim in hand, she was calling for help, screaming bloody-murder at the top of her lungs for the whole neighborhood to hear.

“You shot him?” asked Mom in a rather sincere voice. We were in the kitchen now, with a distraught five-year old between us.

“No, I didn’t shoot him! It was an aerial shot!” I was begging for clarification. “I dropped him, okay!”

And with that, I was grounded. Banished to my room for an entire week.

EMPTINESS.

It is dark, quiet, lonely and cold.

It is vast yet claustrophobic, and it is incredibly painful.

With every breath it slowly seeps in,

until you are completely surrounded inside and out.

Once inside, it begins to burn at the flesh, until there is no barrier between

the inner and outer depths of nothingness.

Emptiness is full of terrible traits.

Alone with my thoughts,

I begin to wonder when they too will abandon me.

Joslyn never did pick up the camera after that.

Mom was convinced that I fixed it long ago, but Sunny was just left collecting dust on the bookshelf. Nestled between an unabridged collection of Shakespeare works and an outdated iMac computer manual, I seemed to be the only one who visited Sunny’s grave. Perhaps it was because I felt guilty or responsible, which I was, but then I began to realize that I just missed my sister. It sounded awfully sentimental in my head, but I couldn’t help but miss the way things were before I shot Sunny.

It was November 16, 2010, when my sister passed away in an auto accident. I used to joke that she must have befriended her phone, but I don’t find that quite as funny anymore. She was only seventeen years old.

She was buried next to my father.

I decided to go through some of the old junk in Mom’s garage. Forcing the cobwebs out of darkness, I uncovered a box with my name on it.

Mom had labeled the box “Chris’ Treasures”, which immediately made my eyes roll. Inside, I found several books I had never read, my old pocketknife, a dozen movie stubs, and my old camera. I picked up each object one by one, brushing off any unwelcome residue. When I picked up my camera, I found a tape inside labeled “Movie no.1”. This was the tape I used to think would make me famous. It was blank.

The next box was heavier than the last, and it was only labeled by a faded “FRAGILE” mark on its side.

To my amazement, the box contained the many tapes Joslyn had made as child. Each tape was nestled in an envelope, but none of them had been sealed. They were all addressed to my father’s military base.

I heaved the box inside while balancing my old camera on top of it. The tapes were labeled by date, so I began to search for the tape labeled “12/25/98”. Once I found it, I placed it in my camera, tossing my blank tape onto the sofa. I turned off the lights and pressed play.

It was dark. Too dark to tell what she was filming. I began to think the tape was ruined until I heard voices on the other side. Suddenly, the screen went bright, and out of the light came into focus my little sister.

But this was not the sister I remembered as a boy.

She was so kind, sweet and welcoming, and she began to give me a tour of the world how she saw it. Over couches and under tables, we effortlessly flew. Along the patterned carpets and checkered walls, we glided. As the tapes spun, I watched my sister grow in a way that I had totally missed before, and what used to look like a whole lot of nothing turned out to be quite something. She told me her struggles and she shared with me her dreams, and I began to befriend the memory of my little sister.

But this is just a memory.

I feel trapped, wishing I could break the barrier between then and now.

It was so close, so tangible, and yet so far away.

I watch as I am placed into my own hands, knowing precisely what is to become of me.

I had plotted to kill my sister’s newfound friend,

but I never thought that friend would be…

Without a moment to lose, I fall.

As for now… I have done it.

Over this edge I will go falling

and my feet must await the bullet I became,

for the poet I become.

As for then… I have gifted it.

Myself with a past where you are always going,

gliding between another passing of my present,

in search of tomorrow’s word for sorrow.

As for forever… I have lived it.

Only ever lonely and alone,

trapped outside a memory,

L O O K I N G