Tchaikovsky's Waltz Of The Flowers

It was too goddamn hot in this room, I thought to myself. Too goddamn hot to sleep and too goddamn hot to be productive. I looked at the old alarm clock on my nightstand that I had owned since I was born and sent a curse or two to the ceiling. It was 4 am and once again I found myself aggressively not sleeping. It had been like this all summer. I wanted so badly to blame my insomnia on biological mistakes and mutations, but I knew the real culprit. My summer thus far had consisted of 18 hour work days between two jobs that I despised more than anything, online classes, a mess of a club that I had somehow become the President of, and a near constant rope of stress ready to hang me at any moment. I’m doing too much, I thought, and as a result, …show more content…
Never thinking clearly enough to bring shoes, I was barefoot, as per usual. I never minded, though. The prickling of concrete on my feet was my punishment for bringing this misery upon myself, but at the same time reminded me I was still alive, still fighting. Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers created the soundtrack to my release. The song that had been a favorite of mine since I was six years old had taken on a much deeper significance. When I performed my first Nutcracker, I remembered watching from the wings as the beautiful ballerinas with their perfect technique flew across the stage like masses of pastel colored larks. I remembered how calm I felt, and how I hadn’t felt that calm in a long while. And so, every night when the shackles on my insides starting tightening, and the precarious threads holding me together threatened to fray, I played this song, and I …show more content…
The cicadas accompanied my Tchaikovsky and felt like old friends returning from a long trip away. Some days I would walk until my legs hurt. Some days I would walk so long that I would return hours later, and have to start getting ready for whatever fresh hell lay before me that day. And some days, when I didn’t want to think at all, I would run, as if the simple act of moving my legs faster would allow me to outrun what I had waiting for me when I returned. I stopped walking at the gorge on Peppermint Street. Blatantly ignoring the No Trespassers sign, I walked down to the water where I could quiet my mind. The time had come for sorting through the mayhem, and I could think of no better place to do it. One by one, I ran through every single entity that was distressing me. I thought about the horrible choices I had made to get me here and wondered who I had killed in a previous life to deserve this karma. I peeked through every crack of misery I could find until there was nothing