Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 122609 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 613(@200wpm)___ 490(@250wpm)___ 409(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122609 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 613(@200wpm)___ 490(@250wpm)___ 409(@300wpm)
Once inside the sparkling red Hyundai Elantra, she turned on the radio to hear, ‘I’m So Into You,’ by Peabo Bryson. She smiled as she remembered her best friend’s grandmother at the kitchen sink washing dishes while this song played. Mrs. Mattie always cooked the best spaghetti in town…
She drove on without a clue as to where she was going. All she needed was to decompress. She enjoyed the night air with her window cracked, allowing air to flow in.
Whoa… Look at this!
She came upon a bridge sporting vibrant, abstract graffiti in one area, and realistic renderings in another. There were lovely women and men dancing in lively colors—you could almost hear the music they were moving to. The art spoke to her, reminding her of a Mexican mural back home in California, done by a famous local artist.
She pulled over, and within minutes she was snapping shots of it. These weren’t just any ordinary scribblings in paint. This was art by someone with uber talent, someone who understood spacing, color, depth and design. The flashing of her camera brightened the area like fragmented blinks of the sun’s eye. She got on her knees at one point, catching different angles. When she was satisfied, she got back into the car and continued on her journey.
She traveled to the downtown area, but didn’t stay long as she wasn’t terribly impressed. She did manage to roll her passenger side window down and take a few candid snapshots of people moseying around, simply being human. That was one of her passions… taking shots of people doing everyday things that were often overlooked. A child eating a cookie and trying to catch the crumbs before they hit the concrete. A homeless woman rummaging through a dented trashcan, determination on her face but emptiness in her eyes. Teenagers laughing, joking, and cursing with white earbuds jammed in their ears. Restaurant workers clad in stained white aprons tossing out trash while sneaking in an extra smoke break. A pregnant woman with short hair and facial piercings waiting at a bus stop. Old people holding paper bags filled with odds and ends.
The world was a canvas. A dirty and wonderful place. A tapestry of pain with colorful Band-Aids taped haphazardly across aching lacerations. The cities and towns all over the globe were filled with people crying, dancing, laughing, eating, fighting, fucking, birthing, killing, sleeping, thinking, dying…
Everyone who is alive is doing something, even if it’s just breathing. That’s somethin’, right? We’re all active. Every person on the planet right now is in motion, even while we rest… All that energy at one time. All that heat. Heart. Love. Pain.
Sometimes her mind wandered, and she enjoyed those moments because she was a self-professed workaholic, and rarely got spaces in her life to spread her cerebral wings and just sit and think. She kept driving around, noticing this and that. After a while, and one too many slow oldie jams, she started getting bored.
I could go back to my hotel room, but I don’t want to. The night is still young.
She pulled over in front of a closed bookstore and snatched open the glove compartment, remembering the tourist guide she’d left in there from the airport. Turning on the overhead light, she flipped through the glossy four-page leaflet. Nothing really struck her fancy, until she got to the back page. Crestone, Colorado…
She’d never heard of such a place, but according to their advertisement, it was full of nomads, artists, interesting architecture, remarkable shops, and the like. So she put the coordinates in the GPS and took off in that direction. She drove quite a while out, almost getting lost when she missed a few turns. It was dark out now, but up ahead she could see the Sangre De Cristo mountains. As she traveled down San Luis Valley highway, she spotted a stupa.
Well I’ll be damned. Look at that…
Grabbing her equipment, she got out of the car, set up a lighting tripod, and began to snap pictures of the unique Buddhist shrine.
But then she heard a strange noise. She looked around, noting a few random houses in the distance, a little odd in appearance but nothing much out of the ordinary. She shrugged it off, returning to her little task until…
“AHHHH!!!”
Dark flapping wings fluttered in the sky.
She burst out laughing when a large bat flew into the air from a nearby tree, scaring her nearly half to death. She finished up her shots, got back in the car, and leisurely continued on her way, taking it all in.
Damn, all the stores and restaurants are closed. Well, it’s still nice out here. Still worth the drive.
“Oh my God…” she whispered to herself as she pulled up to an enormous ivory and gold stupa, this one far larger than the first. It was surrounded by brightly colored flags. She grabbed her phone and Googled the stupas in the area for a few minutes, trying to gather information about the exact one she was looking at. Getting out of her car, she realized that what she thought were merely decorative, colorful decorations were actually prayer flags.