Janalee Colley

Collage Essay

English213

Catastrophe (ca·tas·tro·phe) kuh-tas-truh-fee n. A sudden, and wide-spread disaster.

(We would have made a mess if we were moving faster.)

I’ll never forget the sound of your voice hanging with the potential of murder on a rainy night. Your car, it glides on the sleek road as we laugh our way back to the little coffee house we met in. You smile at me in that way you always do – the way I fell in love with all those months ago. Fell like the rain falls on your windshield. And you look at me, perhaps more than you should. And we both know it. I just wish I would have said it. Your voice that I missed so much, it still hangs. Dry-cleaned, pressed and fresh on a hook – Always better than I remembered. And when you promise to slow down, I pass it all off as fun and games. Stupid teenagers, stupid decisions. The world, it lies when it claims tragedy is played out in slow frames. The time passing from the blasphemy escaping your lips to the sudden jerk of the vehicle to a stop is mere nanoseconds, rather than years. The Lurching in my stomach as we careen to face certain death, your voice of warning, my thoughts of remorse ‘I can’t die like this….’, they shatter with the sound of glass in the distance. Perhaps the determination in my mind was what saved us that night. Perhaps the luck. Perhaps…But we made it out alive. Last minute shattering is never as it seems - Beautiful triumphs, masked by disaster always occur at high speeds.

We were breaking, or broken, one wing beats for both. But now, all the butterflies are dead.

Oh, terrifically twisted glitch that brought me here, how will I know what’s right? When false smiles meet happiness, and two worlds collide, I won’t know what to do.

A miniature doll, plastic clad in a long sleeve shirt and snake skin pants. Boney fingers, boney face, tiny blue eyes. Only mobile by the black strings impaling his shoulders, back, no arms and thighs.

A puppet, and I am the thing puppet master masquerading as the puppet. But you, you will never be my puppet.

A catastrophe in itself that but this dashing little guy cannot be any more than whatever its master decides it can be. He has no control over himself, just like we a had no control over the car May eleventh, 2006. I wonder to myself, if this marionette ever wishes to be tool a real boy.

Ah, these travel I have made – The pillows my head has laid on. The long distance love (lack thereof) that kept all these possibilities at bay. Without meeting you, I thought about you all the time. Perhaps our connection here is buried beneath my clever rhymes.

The fingers of sleep, of youth, drape over breaking words, bending words. And the only thing I can think to do is to call you. And tonight is my night to shine through drive-thru windows, tonight is the night we race through highways to see the glow of a lost life. Tonight, I am an orange, smiling, angel, crowned by this heavy, degrading blue halo.

“Hey beautiful.” Your musical response projects from my cellphone’s tiny speakers.

“Hey, if you help me throw out the trash tonight I promise I’ll give you a fresh coffee.” My lips twist into a smile, anticipating your subtle massacre of the language surrounding your favorite beverage.

“Sure, I’ll be there in a while.”

And you come in like you always do, and in small, subtle ways, you save my life.

The way you looked at me that night, with a pile of wreckage from your BMW framing my vision, gave me chills. More so than the rain now drenching me best clothes. And I find I don't care about my clothes, and I see in your eyes that you don't care about that car. And I grip your knee one last time, in terror as the paramedics take my blood pressure, and confirm what we already know, that we're okay. But we're more than okay now, aren't we?

I was lingering in the dark room, hoping to finish my pinhole developing before the class was over, while everyone was still at lunch. And you walked in the room with the art teacher from next door, holding the most extravagant masterpiece I’d seen in all my years of art class, sitting next to someone much more talented than I. Behind my failed attempts lies the talent I’ve always longed for but never owned. And here you are, holding a canvas stamped with scenic Europe. Your fingertip beauty, we rely upon.

Strange how you painted my favorite location on the planet before I went there. Stranger how I put lyrics and music to a car crash we didn’t experience together until a year after.

All the places I travel in my dreams resemble hell next to your embrace. And when I dangle this promise of freedom, hanging over the edge, it flaunts and taunts you. And we both know how bad you want it. And I want it too.

In all these photographs, your eyes are thatcolorthat I always admired.

“I feel like I’m falling.” you confess.

“I know what you mean.” and I do.

If a catastrophe is a sudden and wide-spread disaster, then I will define a disaster as misfortune. But when all these tiny misfortunes paint a bigger picture, much like the masterpiece you held that day, something beautiful happens.

The loss of a car and the gain of everything we now have. Blame it on rhymes, vacations, and premonitions, but it was really you all along. I found you in a car crash. You and I are a catastrophe