Hello whaleshares! - My whaleshares Introduction Post

Hi everyone! I’ve arrived here at whaleshares within the past week, and I think it’s time for my introduction to the community.

I write most of the time, one thing or another. Poetry is what I write the most, and in fact I write poems daily. For my introduction post however, I’ve written a non-fiction short story about a particular oddity that I’ve lived with my entire waking life. This story is based somewhat, on events and occurrences in my life that inspired the poem that I mention in the story, and something wonderful that happened to me from hearing the words in a line in a song. I hope you enjoy reading it.

I’m planning to post a lot of new original writing here, like this piece, mixed with some of my stuff I’ve published on steemit since I started there. I’m glad to be part of this community, with another opportunity to publish to the world!

Anyway, here’s my short story, below the picture. I hope you find it entertaining:

I’m partial to the thought that Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb is the greatest song ever written, and it’s partly because one of the lines in the song hit me like a brick “Wall” when I heard it for the first time.

“When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse, out of the corner of my eye; I turned to look but it was gone; I cannot put my finger on it now, the child is grown, the dream is gone…”

The poem I posted here at whaleshares a couple days ago, Yellow House, and the reason why I wrote it, is connected to this line in Comfortably Numb; it hit me so hard upon hearing those words the first time. That yellow house experience, on which the poem is based, was my own fleeting glimpse - out of the corner of my eye, and when I turned to look - it was gone just as the song describes. This isn’t the reason why I think Pink Floyd is the greatest band ever, by the way; I had thought that before I ever heard Comfortably Numb, actually.

But that line! Nothing in my life has been more eerie and/or unexplainable than my Yellow House experience which, as the poem explains, still affects me to this day even though the house no longer stands. Nothing concerning what I know, or feel, or think about it ever changes. It never progresses, and it never retreats. The images are as clear as they’ve ever been, and they come to my mind at my will, and sometimes they just make an unexpected appearance on their own. Yeah, it’s a very weird situation; having these hauntingly clear images of somewhere I’ve been, just not physically. I’ve never been able to understand why I have this… why I have just this glimpse of something… and not a reason or explanation for it.

Not that it troubles me in any way, mind you. It is not, and never has been, a scary ordeal. On the contrary; I’ve always felt a sort of comforting feeling from seeing the images with my mind's eye, and from the whole experience, really. Life, for me has gone on as normally as possible I feel, otherwise. And Hell, I don’t know; maybe everyone has a similar experience. That’s how I’ve looked at it.

A friend told me that The Wall was to be listened to from beginning to end, as it tells a story. I hadn’t really listened to it yet at that point, but I generally listen to an album beginning to end anyway. My friend’s words did cause me to think about it “telling a story” when I listened the first time though. When that point in Comfortably Numb arrived and I heard those words, I had the most incredible, awakening-like feeling rush through me. It kind of assured me that I wasn’t alone, because it described, in words, how I felt, but could never express in my own words.

One feeling about the Yellow House experience that I’ll probably never understand is why I was shown this glimpse, and nothing more. It’s always seemed to me that maybe there was something that I was supposed to do. As I wrote, when we’d drive by the house when I was a kid, about 4 years old, and I’d tell my parents that I knew what the inside of the house looked like, they’d just tell me that I was never in that house, that I just had a dream, etc. I asked a couple of times if we could go there and see the inside, but my mother said that an old couple lived there, and they weren’t going to bother them by taking me there to see their house.

If we’d have kept living in that area, I may have gone myself and told the people my story and asked if I could come in and see the house, but we moved away long before I was old enough to do that. Living in a new town was enough to put the images to rest mostly, for a while. When I was grown, I did travel back to the area, but by then the house had been torn down, and where the house once stood, was all field that was being farmed with crops. So I guess I’ll never understand why I have the images. No other images that come to my mind are as clear as those images. Why I was given a glimpse and not the full picture doesn’t bother me that much. And like I said, they calm me, always making me Comfortably Numb.*