Daze of Heaven

In preparation of the final, I decided to spend this blog post on a first attempt at writing inspired by Murakami's work.

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The wind calmed down. The stalks of wheat, like a painter's brush, no longer playfully stroked my canvas of a face. When my mind finally completed a painting of that red bike, I pedaled into a deep sleep.

I awoke to the call of my name. My eyes opened dazedly. The surrounding wheat hung over me on all sides like trees. A forest of gold sheltered me from the world. A small patch of blue was framed in the center of my view. The blue paired nicely with the remnant memory of that faded red bike so vivid in my dream. I heard my name again, coming from the road near the bottom of the hill I was laying on. Sitting up, my head poked just above the surrounding wheat. It was my best friend, my only friend, standing near my dad’s old bike, which I carelessly dropped to the side of the road before making my way up the hill. His determined eyes, shaded by his left hand, scanned the field stalk by stalk, searching for any sign of me. I put my hand up submissively and waved it side to side like a white flag of surrender. He noticed my efforts halfway through one of his scans, and carefully propped his own bike against the fence separating the road from the field before hopping it and making his way towards me.

Cutting through the wheat with serenity, he floated towards me, his legs hidden in the growth of crop. For a moment, I thought I was dreaming again. He wore his usual green chino pants and an untucked white dress shirt, all on top of his favorite white Nike trainers, the ones with light blue swooshes. He always failed to make it to the top two buttons of his shirt, leaving a small area of his chest’s soft, light skin exposed. His slender neck mirrored the softness of his chest and made his strong jawline more pronounced. His high cheekbones framed the warm hint of a smile he constantly wore nicely. His thick eyebrows expressed all of the emotions his eyes couldn’t. His eyes bore the gleam of his soft smile, no matter how distressed or upset he truly was. His short, messy hair hid away from the world underneath a baseball cap.

“Your dad said you might be out here” he stopped and said, still a few meters away from me. 

I had yet to speak a word all morning, and I wasn’t sure how to respond to his comment, so I kept my unspoken vow of silence. Replying to my silence with a less dedicated imitation, he closed the gap between us and found a seat in the wheat just to my right. “Have you been here long?” he asked, tearing the top half of a wheat stalk off of its stem and placing it between the right side of his lips. “You know, your dad said he hasn’t seen much of you in the past few days.” He spoke out of the left side of his mouth. I nodded slowly, unsure of which of his statements I was answering. He had recently tried to stop smoking cigarettes, and he was unconsciously miming slow drags on the wheat stalk, each with a complementary exhale. He took the stalk from between his lips with his right index and middle fingers, and in a second-nature-habitually-driven manner, he stubbed out the stalk in the dirt to his side, careful to make sure no embers remained lit. Looking at my face, then scanning my clothing up and down, he smirked. “Are you seriously wearing the same clothes I saw you in two days ago?”. I nodded slowly once more, looking down at my unkempt clothing. I hadn’t thought about my clothing in a while, I couldn’t remember when I had put it on in the first place. So, I hadn’t seen him in two days. What happened to yesterday?  

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- Bergen