On Feeling Free

When I was eleven, my father took me to Longwood Gardens and let me loose in that property, which was very much charted but felt wild to me. I took a book halfway up a tree that stood on the edge of a meadow. In my imagination, the tree marked the furthest corner of the map; the meadow, belonging to no one except for maybe the owner of the farmhouse in the distance. I was not reading Jane Austen but I was thinking of her, or rather Keira Knightley's Elizabeth Bennet. I could picture her, trudging in the mud three miles to her sick sister or springing along on a nicer day, with a notebook maybe, cheerful but deep in thought. I don’t think I read as much as I sat there enjoying the thought of reading. It was Spring, or at least it was Spring in my memory. Sweet air and weather so temperate it felt like the earth was bending exactly to your needs.

Back then I yearned for food fights; like quick sand or the Bermuda triangle, food fights are a phenomenon that the television of my childhood had me believing were inevitable encounters. That was before I had any reason to be nervous about the waste. Now I keep a compost, now I mourn for the food I toss inside it, but then it seemed a moral good to hurl lunch at your peers because there’s no hierarchy in a tornado. I think that kind of chaos still appeals to me. In Spring I see it the most. For one, the ever-later snow storms shake everything up. Oh it's fun to complain (“I wish I could get home!” “Three days and no power?”) but secretly I love to be thrown into it, forced into community. Last March the storms meant crouching in the dark hallway with my closest friend, my prospective lover. I had dreamt of us from the start, a whole semester ago and now here we were, facing the door to a room full of friends, holding each other in secret. Spring is mating season even if it's still freezing outside. 

Oh and the Spring before that, and before that! For teenagers, Spring is Prom, and Prom night for me had been disastrous. The first one a rejection--why had she brought me here at all? I spent more time with her friends than she did. She brought me yellow roses that night-- symbolism neither of us clocked. By the time the next Prom rolled around, I was all tangled up in the musician, the “king of the South Jersey DIY scene,” who I pretended to enjoy listening to in various basements, swaying with all the other underage worshippers. He gave me yellow roses too; not because he wanted to be my friend but because at the time yellow was my favorite color, it was “my” color, which anyone who wanted to flatter me referenced. I thought he knew me well. I thought he knew me well enough to know that later that night when I told him that I wanted to stop he would care to do so. He did not. I still have the flowers he gave me-- from that night and from the “please go out with me” flowers which preceded them and the “please forgive me” flowers which followed. Not because I want to remember him but because they were pretty flowers, still pretty dried and pressed, and it is not the flowers’ fault that such an awful man picked them. 

The pain! The pain endured in Spring, among all that beauty. The pain when that night huddled in the dark was not the first of many but the last of few; the pain as those earlier flowers wilted. But it is a healing time. No matter how shitty you feel the outdoors remind you that it’s not all bad, and if you can bring yourself to a park, to roll down a hill or dip your toes in a creek, you’ll feel a bit better. I discovered this while healing from Her, the first one, the prelude to all the others. Even now she remains the yardstick against which I measure so much-- wit, intelligence, honesty. In January we took a “love letters” mural tour though West Philly, which was more or less a ride on the El with some professional commentary along the way. It ended at 69th Street station and that’s when she did it, gently, in tears. I was too naive to see it coming.

Two or three months later, on a warm day, I found myself back in that neighborhood, which I perceived as dangerous and so got a thrill from exploring. I, a child of the suburbs, was not accustomed to taking busses but realized before I boarded that cash was probably necessary. I got on the bus with none. The driver gave me a smile, waved me on back, and took me to Fairmount Park. (In those days when things “worked out” for me, I assumed that it was because the world was generally kind, and not because of my position within it.) The park was vast and uncharted. I was skipping. I was running as if I didn't care that people could see me. I read in a quiet spot while my feet were submerged in some very shallow and cold water, half hidden in some bushes. I felt joy; joy which comes when heaviness is lifted, when things are “working out”. It didn't go away forever, such is impossible, but the absence of weight reminded me that it was possible to feel free.

The twenty-year-old is old enough to feel the weight of the world and of her past, for it to give one confidence in the future; old enough to presume she has control but young enough not to have it. I think that I know chaos but I don’t--I know melodrama. But that’s fine! I’ve been weaving my own story like all those books told me to, like in a daydream. What is a greater joy than to daydream? To lounge with a novel face down on your chest, eyes resting on the tops of green trees that line the field before you, watching how they sway like drunk teens with their eyes closed, moving in accordance with music someone else is playing. In dreaming, there is freedom--freedom from pain or freedom to make something of out of it. Once again it is Spring, and this time around it doesn’t hurt to look at murals in West Philly, or to dance in basements, to watch flowers dry or to hug the friend I thought would be my lover. There is pain in my past and there is pain in my future but for now I feel as free as that little girl, barefoot in a tree, dreaming of a story which is not hers but which bears her likeness.

About the Author

Elizabeth Rudderow is a Sophomore International Studies Major with Minors in German and Cultural Anthropology who reads and writes in her free time.