Scribbles and Bits

Upon the 34th Anniversary of My Arrival Twelve thousand, forty-five days perfecting the art of w a l k i n g  on e g g s h e l l s around someone who disowned me three times through text and email. Three hundred ninety-six months placating a woman who would abandon her child with near-strangers in a place seventeen hundred miles away from normalcy. Three decades living on edge, startled by loud noises and careful to make myself small and contained. But this year I wanted something different: Permission to empty my world of the people and things reluctantly hoarded out of guilt or shame. To make space to breathe, to find my voice, to find myself buried long ago in the crushed dreams and abandoned pursuits of a love-starved little girl. To find what sets my soul aflame… To know what my laughter sounds like… For my thirty-fourth birthday I laid my past to rest, and launched a mission to rescue myself.

Red light blackens as the narrow door creaks open an invitation to enter the sacramental space. Feet are hesitant to move into the void where I am stripped of my mask and my sins made known. I kneel The springs of the padding beneath me groan a song of neglect mimicking the ache of years in my bones. I cross myself before the closed window between me and my confessor. Sliding wood and the reminiscence of a face disguised by woven metal reveal I'm not alone. "Forgive me Father, for I have sinned it's been far too long since I faced myself." Long enough for the paint to peel curls of white revealing brick. Long enough to forget how claustrophobic my secrets feel, how trapped, how small I am in this prettied closet. I have come to unburden this heart of a load to heavy to carry further.

The house is never truly still. There is an almost endless punctuation of shrill beeps of mechanisms I've long resented, shoving aside peace and mind with their demands for attention. A disrespect for my time that mirrors their insensitivity toward the restlessness and frustration their interruptions leave in their wake. I just need time enough to finish one incomplete thought... Just one train of thought that isn't hijacked by a notification.

We are never more alive than when embracing our grand finale. *** My death sentence came in the exam room-- brief, with apologies and a note of sorrow in the directive to put my affairs in order. But in the upside-down of my mind, there was no order: only lists of regrets that needed to be unwritten. I refused to race toward the end of my tomorrows and reluctantly greet Death at the finish line. No. I ran to the warmth of each day, telling strangers they were beautiful, loving embracing laughing. I learned to dance for joy with my failing body. And in those last few months, I lived more than those I left behind

The doctor asked how the meds were working for me, but I was too engrossed in the haziness outside. It was daylight but not bright. Blue, but not blue. Grey, but not grey. Not-grey, not-blue, full of clouds that glow like fire when the sun begins to set. Curiously, I cannot see the sun. No sun. No clouds. Just a blanket of not-blue covering all above until I've forgotten what blue looked like. Oppressive and unimpressive. Real and light, but shades of wrong The sky, never truly dark anymore, but also, not quite right. But I've forgotten what the sky looks like and now it's all not-blue, yet not-grey. "I guess it's working" I reply, still lost in the wrong colors outside