Young and in Yoga

dug this one up for my portfolio...

Young and in Yoga
Shannon Ayala 07/2007
Intro to Creative Writing: Kazlotski

Harold puts a beanie cap over most of his wild, curly blonde hair and gives a thumbs up to the yellow smiley face painted onto the black painted mirror in his bedroom. He throws his corduroy bag over his shoulder and closes his door behind him. He walks through the living room to the front door and then turns around with his hand on the knob to say goodbye to his parents. The mother is sitting in a chair reading a newspaper and the father is playing with the dog on the carpet. “Mom and Dad, I’m leaving civilization.”
“When will you be home?” says his mother through the newspaper.
“I don’t know. When I’ve found enlightenment.”
“Do you have enough money?”
“I won’t need much money. Bye.” He opens the door.
“Where are you going exactly?”
“Montana.”
Her eyelashes flash up at him with her head still angled. “Montana is civilization Harold.”
“What are you doing?” asks the dad playfully.
“Montana is open and quiet. You haven’t been listening to anything I’ve been saying for years. I love you anyway, bye.”
“Don’t forget anything,” says the mother.
“I love you boy,” the father says to the dog.
Harold’s eyes turn and his body follows out the door.

His bike slows down at a house that has an open door, kids on the grass, Spanish music playing loudly, barbeque smoke rising behind it and voices mingling. He drops his bike on the lawn and walks into the open door. There is a banner: John’s Leaving Civilization! Harold laughs and a short Spanish man with a mustache and a friendly, round smiling face puts his hairy hand on his shoulder. “Harold, Harold boy, you kids are crazy,” he says cheerfully and then he drops his tone and narrows his face. “Escuche. I hope you find God out there. My boy has a lot of love in his heart. He doesn’t need to go anywhere. But he says, ‘Papa, the mystic did it, the mystic left his body.’ So I say okay if you want to leave your body, it’s yours to leave.” The father smiles again. “You go to the universe eh!” He grips his shoulder one more time and leaves.
A joyful looking young guy pops up with a bag over his shoulder and says, “Harold!” delivering a big hug.
“Hello.”
“Come on, let’s leave civilization. Bye everybody!”
They all yell things in Spanish at him and he rushes out the door with Harold. “Throw your bike in the garage. Sylvia is going to drive us to the subway.”
“Hello Harold,” Sylvia says and puts her cheek out to be kissed. She has big loop earrings and black hair pulled back tight.
They slam the car doors and take off. “When are you coming back?” she asks them in the rear view mirror.
John shrugs, “I don’t know. There’s life out there.”
“There’s nothing out there,” she says.
Harold Laughs. “It’s not for long. This is just for mastering our minds out in the Earth.”
“Is New York not the Earth?” Sylvia asks.
“No,” says Harold. Him and John look at each other in doubt and then look back and agree, “No,” They say. John says, “It’s another planet.”
“We’re planet hopping,” says Harold.
“John,” Says Sylvia, “I didn’t understand your father’s story. What happened to the gangster dude?”
John looks at Harold and says, “My father was telling that story about the gangster who turned to Jesus and left the gang.”
“Oh right of course.”
“It sort of inspired him to become a preacher.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. So anyway Sylvia, the gangster wanted to stab the guy right? But he couldn’t because he was stuck in his seat.”
“Yeah I don’t understand, they glue him to his seat?”
Laughing, John said, “No, some mysterious force kept him in his seat.”
Sylvia’s jaw dropped in understanding. “Oh that’s some freaky shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Is that why you’re going to Montana?”
“No. It’s just to untangle my mind but yea, sort of.”
“The purpose is to escape samsara.” Says Harold.
“What’s that?”
“It’s the illusory world of ignorance, suffering and rebirth.”
“It’s your mind,” John finishes.
“Your mind is samsara?”
“Most of the time.” John says.
“Oh yea?” She says with her eyes darting on the road. “Well when you finally untangle your mind, you know what you’re going to think?”
“What?”
“What the hell am I doing in Montana?”

She pulls up near the subway on a busy street and lets them go. Harold waits at the green railing while Sylvia holds John’s hands and tells him he’s stupid. He says, “I know. It’s not decision though, it’s destiny.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re stupid.” She puts her hand on her hip and says, “Well if you change your mind you can have this.”
“Wow.”
Harold shouts, “Change your mind dude!”
“Okay, bye Sylvia.” John says. He kisses her and leaves and she watches him go.
Harold hooks his arm with John’s and lifts his beanie cap to her as they go down the steps.

They sit across from each other in the moderately populated subway car. John looks at Harold with mild excitement. “I can feel it.” John says.
“What?”
“I can just feel it.”
“Okay.”
“The fresh air is already flowing through the mountains and up my nose into my brain.”
“Yeah me to,” Harold says flatly.
John pulls out a small, white, paperback book. He rips his bookmark in half and shoves it in another page. He says, “here, read 170,” as he tosses the book across to him. Harold catches it and looks at him the way his mother had that morning.
“Why’d you rip your bookmark?”
John laughs and Harold smiles. He reads the cover, Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger, and opens the marked page. The page starts in the middle of a sentence. Quotations end and start again. “My God!” says the book. “He’s only the most intelligent man in the Bible, that’s all!”
At that moment a black woman on the train in a leopard dress takes slow hesitant steps with a small, black, paperback book in her hand. She says, “Brothers and sisters! The lord is with us now.” Harold looks up at the woman who stands three feet away. “We know we need him now. The world… is apocalyptic. Look around! It’s never been such a mess. Who could believe how real this is?” Harold looks at John who is looking at the woman and then he goes back into the book.
The book continues, “Who besides Jesus really knew which way is up?”
“Why are we swimming in our emotion?” The woman distracts him. “Why do we let our little problems control us? This is 2007. This isn’t 2000 years ago! Isn’t it time? Isn’t it time we control our own minds, our feelings? Who cares if America is doomed? Who cares if our president is dumb? We can’t fix that. All we can do is find our light inside.” Harold looks around and sees that every person is paying attention. She isn’t your usual obnoxious, fanatical Christian he thinks. These are not the usual words that are shouted to people who ignore them. The woman wears a sweaty smile and speaks with her pointer finger. She moves slowly and gently like a reptile.
She says, “Sure feels like the end times,” and Harold dives into his book. The book picks up, “Jesus realized there is no separation from God… Oh my God, what a mind! Who else, for example, would have kept his mouth shut when Pilate asked for an explanation? Not Solomon. Don’t say Solomon.”
“Solomon couldn’t help you or anybody else,” the woman in the leopard dress disrupts once again. “Socrates can’t love you like Jesus.” He glances at the page and Socrates is in the next sentence. Now he has to surrender his attention to the lady in the leopard dress. “Jesus made it through all those obstacles that we have. He knows what it’s like to feel pain. He has gone through everything you have. He felt death. He tasted death for us.” When the car stops the lady maintains perfect balance while not holding onto anything. Harold and John look at each other telepathically.
“He’s working on me,” the lady says. “I’m still a little messed up but he’s trying to perfect me. I asked him to reveal himself to me and he did.” They look at each other again and then back at her. Her body moves as if it is carrying energy that she can hardly control. “I gave myself up. I surrendered my life to him. I said I’d do whatever I can. I don’t care how hard or terrifying. If I have to do it alone than that’s the only thing to do.”
The car stops and the woman stands completely still at the abruptness of the stop. John gestures to Harold to get up. They get up and wait for the lady in the leopard dress to slowly move through the door. They follow her out and stand in a spot watching her walk in seemingly no direction.
“Lets follow her,” John whispers excitedly.
Harold shrugs. “No I don’t think that’s the point of our… crossing paths with her.”
John looks at Harold suspiciously. “Aren’t you curious?”
“I feel paralyzed by that last thing she said.”
He reflects. “…Solomon?”
“No, that she surrendered to God and she works alone.”
“Right.”
“So are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“We should take her with us.”
“What? Dude!” He stares off absently with a tear forming in his eye. “Obviously we have to split up.”
John stares at him speechlessly and confused. Harold finally looks at him. “We have to split up, man.”
“What makes you so sure? She probably lives with somebody that she sees when she goes home.”
“Oh I doubt it. I bet you everyone she knows is dead.”
“So let’s go follow her and find out. If it turns out she lives with someone or even has close friends besides church people than we stick together amigo.”
“C’mon it’s going to take forever to find out a thing like that. We’d have to spy on her for days and then we’re going to realize it was all in vain because we don’t want to split up.”
“Okay, so let’s just sleep at the loft as planned and we’ll see what you think in the morning.”
“Good idea.”

In one big empty room with open windows at the end, on a bed stripped to the springs next to the windows, John sleeps soundly in a sleeping bag next to the heavy downpour of rain. Thunder blasts and still he doesn’t stir.
On an adjacent couch against the wall Harold is sitting in the full lotus position on the couch meditating by a candle. He opens his eyes and looks at John to see if he is really sleeping. He looks over at the digital clock that reads 2:59 a.m. He reaches over for a pack of cigarettes and lights one while his legs are still crossed. He sinks back on the couch and closes his eyes. The first thing he sees is a swarm of maggots. He drags his hand across his eyes and looks down at his cigarette realizing that he is falling asleep. He drags it anyway. His eyelids fall down and he sees a fragile tree in the autumn night, wrapped in a leopard dress. He drags the cigarette with his eyes closed and hears murmuring in the hallway.
The voice, obscured as if with a cigar, like a man from a 1940s detective film, emerges into coherence, “She said the lord revealed his self to her…
“Samsara and maggots and trees with dresses.” The voice gets louder as it gets closer to the door. “’There’s a killer on the road’. He’s a killer, kills the self…” Harold puts out his cigarette and blows out the candle. He lies down and faces the cushions. The voice is at the door. “Knock, knock, I’m in your head, if I don’t talk than you are dead.”
“Fuck off Sammy.” Harold says but is not sure if he has spoken out loud or not. He hears the door open and close. He focuses on the sound of the rain but the voice, now in the room, penetrates through.
“She could have seen anything, that lady,” continues the voice. “Perhaps her path requires solitude but no, this one does too. It’s always the same. But friendship is good in the beginning. There is no beginning. You can die and why were you wasting your time?”
There is a gigantic blast of thunder. The voice disappears. There is a silence in his mind that strikes deep and obvious. In the sudden absence of his mind, the residue of thought is exposed as pure vanity.

In the sunny morning Harold wakes up and sees John sitting on the floor next to him, eating a sandwich and looking at him. John smiles and gives him a sandwich. “Got you an egg sandwich,” says John.
“I thought you didn’t eat eggs.”
“No mine is just cheese.”
“You don’t eat cheese either.”
“Oops. Anyway, have you decided?”
I still have no idea. I don’t think it matters though.
“I just decided when I was waiting for this sandwich that I’ll go to New Mexico and find a Shaman Guru.”
“Okay. Sure.”
“Are you really okay with that?”
“What difference does it make if I am okay with that? Just write me letters.
"Have you not had this New Mexico idea before?” continued Harold.
“Well I had this dream last night. Sylvia was slowly unbuttoning her shirt. And then suddenly she lifted her hand up to me. There was an eye in her palm.”
“And then she bounced away like a rabbit into the desert.”
John laughed, shaking his head. “It seemed like the eye was studying me so I looked at myself and I was wearing a leopard dress. I started laughing and I kept asking, ‘where’s the lady? Where’s the lady?’ And then Sylvia said New Mexico.”
Harold nodded his tired head. “Are there thunder storms in Montana?”
“Sure, why not?”
“I’m going to take some comfort where I can find thunder storms. Maybe Washington.”
“Is thunder comforting?”
“You’re the one who slept like you were dead last night.”
“It thundered last night?”
Harold looks at him bitterly and then relaxes and says, “thank you for the sandwich man.”
John nods and says, “I can feel it already, the cool desert air rushing through the caverns and up my nose into my brain.”