I'll avert my eyes and pretend I don't see, put in my headphones and pretend I don't hear.
I graduate May 22, 2010. I don't know what comes next, but it's not more of the same, so that's a good thing. That's the only thing right now. I have all these people in my life that I don't talk to, or that I can't talk to, and that I don't feel safe around. People I'm supposed to trust and love and I've tried so hard for so long to find that trust and love -- but I just can't do it anymore.
I tried the "Fake it 'til you make it" campaign. The fact is, I was trying to make it to something I'm not sure I ever wanted. And I know they don't understand how it could be so difficult for me to find words, but I've felt like the woman in the song for as long as I can remember. I feel like people are trying temporary cures for a permanent problem -- the problem being me -- and they're trying to keep me here not because they want me here, but because they will otherwise feel like failures. But they want me to go back to being something I don't think I ever was. They want me to open up to them, to let them be a part of my life, but only insofar as that life fits with what they want from me, so long as that life is the tidy little package they want for me.
They want things for me that do well for them, but that don't do well for me.
And at some point you have to choose. Because you can't have both. And I think the world is saying it's my time.
So what's it gonna be? Roots or wings?
Showing posts with label Fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fiction. Show all posts
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Ashes, ashes... we all fall down.
I didn't think about what it would look like if there was no wind. In my mind, there was always wind. But when it comes time to go through with it, the only thing that moves the water is the current of the river. When it comes time to watch the wind pick up the ashes and carry them over the water of the springs, there is no wind.
He falls into the water and sinks -- bone chips and carbon soot side by side -- and I wonder that I do not fall with him. The blues and greens of the Florida autumn reflect off the water like a a lyric in a James Taylor song, the sort that always makes me want to cry when I'm driving north, into the city, on 93 with my father. But a manatee reaches its snout up toward the sky and there's an insect hum behind me in the trees and everything feels so peaceful for a moment that it doesn't matter that the pale, pinkish ashes are smudged on my fingers and the last of him is creased into the sides of an Ikea tupperware.
I wish there was an alligator, to add an air of menace, or desperation. The manatees feel so normal, the large, soft angles of their scarred bodies rippling beneath the water that is always exactly seventy-two degrees. Manatees break so easily, chilled by cooler water or sliced by propellers, and their bodies show every white scar like military stripes on a young man's corpse. When I was a year old, they said he would never learn to walk again, that he could not train his legs to work on land or sea. I never knew him out of braces, without a wheelchair close by -- just in case! -- and a slow, crooked walk. But I never knew him not to walk.
I will pretend it was his left hand that I lost today. Perhaps at some point later on, I will lose his right hand, or his foot, and like that, piece by piece, he will disappear from me. Someday, I will lose his gash of a mouth, his coarse gray beard, his tired, slanting eyes. The braces will fall off his legs and he will hobble around, blind and deaf, but with me. Until eventually, all that I can keep from him will be the sound of his voice, the crack in my own as I say for the last time, "I love you; you have no idea how much." And when I lose that echo, when his, "Hello, dear!" finally fades away, then I will fall into the water with him and become silt. Still, but for the currents.
He falls into the water and sinks -- bone chips and carbon soot side by side -- and I wonder that I do not fall with him. The blues and greens of the Florida autumn reflect off the water like a a lyric in a James Taylor song, the sort that always makes me want to cry when I'm driving north, into the city, on 93 with my father. But a manatee reaches its snout up toward the sky and there's an insect hum behind me in the trees and everything feels so peaceful for a moment that it doesn't matter that the pale, pinkish ashes are smudged on my fingers and the last of him is creased into the sides of an Ikea tupperware.
I wish there was an alligator, to add an air of menace, or desperation. The manatees feel so normal, the large, soft angles of their scarred bodies rippling beneath the water that is always exactly seventy-two degrees. Manatees break so easily, chilled by cooler water or sliced by propellers, and their bodies show every white scar like military stripes on a young man's corpse. When I was a year old, they said he would never learn to walk again, that he could not train his legs to work on land or sea. I never knew him out of braces, without a wheelchair close by -- just in case! -- and a slow, crooked walk. But I never knew him not to walk.
I will pretend it was his left hand that I lost today. Perhaps at some point later on, I will lose his right hand, or his foot, and like that, piece by piece, he will disappear from me. Someday, I will lose his gash of a mouth, his coarse gray beard, his tired, slanting eyes. The braces will fall off his legs and he will hobble around, blind and deaf, but with me. Until eventually, all that I can keep from him will be the sound of his voice, the crack in my own as I say for the last time, "I love you; you have no idea how much." And when I lose that echo, when his, "Hello, dear!" finally fades away, then I will fall into the water with him and become silt. Still, but for the currents.
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