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Thursday - March 28, 2024

Articles Written By AndrewLenec

 

Thaw

January 16th, 2017

My fear of falling is surpassed in my life only by my fear of stagnation. For all of my adult life I have wandered, unable to take root in one place for too long, even when I have tried to do so. Perhaps my failure to synthesize permanence has been the expression of some latent, subconscious desire to avoid the imprisonments of circumstance. But regardless of any and all efforts, there have been portions of my years, bricks laid heavy as the seasons, during which I have found myself feeling immobilized behind the walls of time.   Winter hangs like a shroud over the days, even beneath the persistent... Read More

Freeze

January 11th, 2017

Climbing, honestly, is not the thing about which I am most passionate, but it is the thing by which I am most consumed. Another winter has crept silently in, freezing all ambition into things statuesque, objets d’art to be gazed at in wonder, the entirety of autumn one far away idea to be thawed in the spring. These months could easily be those of last year’s hibernation, or two years ago, or even, if God does exist and he is unkind, a glimpse into the future. With the first snowfall of the season I see myself as having come full circle, ready yet again for hibernation, the cold making me... Read More

Calmed

December 13th, 2016

I breathe deeply as I tie my knot, looping the rope the same way that I always do, dressing it carefully so that its layers lie comfortably amongst themselves, the lengths all perfect, the tension equal. I sit down to put on my shoes, left first, pulling the velcro taught and flexing my toes against the rubber, then the right, moving laterally in my ritual as if reading whatever it is my body has to say. It is the same each and every time and it is a process, one that I take slowly and with care not to rush. The moment I step off of the ground I am attempting to enter a unique space within myself,... Read More

Calm

November 22nd, 2016

I breathe deeply as I tie my knot, looping the rope the same way that I always do, dressing it carefully so that its layers lie comfortably amongst themselves, the lengths all perfect, the tension equal. I sit down to put on my shoes, left first, pulling the velcro taught and flexing my toes against the rubber, then the right, moving laterally in my ritual as if reading whatever it is my body has to say. It is the same each and every time and it is a process, one that I take slowly and with care not to rush. The moment I step off of the ground I am attempting to enter a unique space within myself,... Read More

Red

November 1st, 2016

Though the sun shines unseasonably strong and its rays heat the air in days that are unrecognizable as November, nothing stands motionless as it would in the lethargy of summer, and a near-constant wind sweeps the city and kicks up dirt and is not powerful enough to really affect that which it touches, but instead scratches at every door, whimpers, as though nature itself were restless for change. For days I have been losing water, like a ship sinking in reverse; I float above the wonders concealed in blue, and amidst the rocking of life’s waves I tear at the planks beneath my feet, hoping to... Read More

Float

October 25th, 2016

We crossed under the gate in the chain-link fence and onto the tarmac, which was dotted with small planes. The day was clear and filled with a low wind, and that spot on the earth was open and so clearly a point of ejection into everything surrounding it. The sky was blank and ended only with my sight. Ours was lone and well-worn, and he circled it with discernment and determined love, fatherly and shrewd. This was the vessel, after all, in which we would be reading the laws of nature and reinterpreting them for ourselves, flight as man’s elasticity clause. I don’t think he had ever even set... Read More

Granulation Tissue

October 18th, 2016

I can feel my bones hardening, a stolid ache of the marrow like monoliths being built under the skin. I have spilled more blood in the last five months than life ever taught me was even mine to spill. The flesh of my lip split into ribbons is the prettiest pink, I see, soft and newborn and a flower springing out amidst decay, as I stand in the mirror in true form, a landscape of gashes like canyon walls viewed by vultures. If the sun is not out to pull me from roots, then into the soil I sink. And my yawns are continents shifting, the groans of plates brushing shoulders and oiled by dust. There... Read More

Slow Sky Out West

October 11th, 2016

Autumn has finally arrived… or at least it has in theory. This December will mark my first full year in Colorado, and the rolling of the months upon themselves has revealed to me the strange complexities of the mountains’ seasons. I think of October in New York, and of the winds that blow as if the raw exhalations of some impending death, littering leaves like trash, of scarves and coffee and the pallid sky out of which the sun is chased by gray. And yet here in Boulder, summer seems to dip its toes into fall’s waters tentatively, withdrawing time and again with chill, and I sit shirtless... Read More

In Restless Walks

October 4th, 2016

He knew even before the key reached the lock that she was inside, some premonitory hum in the air, and though he was usually quick to dismiss such notions, her presence as a fact settled easily among the others and he felt no surprise. He probably knew as soon as he stepped off of the elevator, without knowing it, and she seeped beneath the door and filled the hallway, and his blood hummed with each step until he reached for the knob and knew somehow exactly what he would see when the hinges creaked and the slab of steel swung open and into the kitchen, the counter usually destitute but now covered... Read More

On the Death of a Stranger

September 27th, 2016

A girl I knew in high school posted childhood pictures of the two of them, without caption or commentary, and the grainy stills did not sit well with me. Her intention, it was unspokenly clear, was more than reminiscent. A cursory web search of his name returned first a years-old news story from the town in which we all grew up, detailing his arrest after having fallen through the ventilation system of the administrative building of a local housing development, his afterhours violation neither validated nor explained in its absurdity by the article. The image was so quintessentially Kyle – an... Read More