lately, i remember

It is the midnight hour, and my bed is quiet and warm amidst the torrent that lashes against the sides of the house; and nonetheless I shudder because I am cold on the inside. When I was little, I used to think the flash and the growl of thunder rattling the windows was actually a band of tigers, roaring and fighting to get into my room. I can remember sitting under my quilt, just as I am now, but with eyes wide with terror, wondering how to get them to go away, or find someone to save me. I can remember finally pulling up enough courage to slip past the door and go running down the dark hallway to escape. I’d come barging into my parent’s room, and crawl into the empty side where Dad sometimes slept. Of course there were no tigers in Oklahoma. My mother tried again and again to make me understand this. But without fail… every summer thunderstorm after dark, I’d find myself waking up, hearing the growling, and seeing the striped faces at my window in a flash of lightning.

I’m grown now. My imagination plagues me still. But I know that tigers cannot get me here. Still the rain lashing against my windows fills me with a sense of dread that I can’t shake; an unrelenting fear, that plagues me from my childhood. 

muscle memory

The moon is nearly full.

I know this, not because I can see it, hoping to catch a side-long winking glance in the 1 AM sky from the rear view mirror, but rather because I am due to start my period in the next couple days. The moon and I are linked; she and I wax and wane like two long time girlfriends, synced in their tides.

Tonight, there are remnants of storm clouds: ragged banners left in the front yard of some celestial bachelor party. And I can't see her, the moon, and I miss her quiet silver company along the road. But there are other sources of light to guide my eyes and tires on the pavement – modern spindly creatures, hunched like sentinels, dim orange heads ever watchful.

And my feet have fallen into a familiar pattern upon the gas pedal, my hands turn automatically, and my pensive brain wakes to make the realization that I am in an old neighborhood, a place of memories: the smell of cut grass, the taste of fresh lemonade, the scrape of chalk on the driveway, bright powder on my hands: it is a place of childhood.

Left on this street, right on that one, come to a pause at the stop sign, marvel at the great live oak in the yard across the way, and turn into the cul-de-sac; still on autopilot, running a path burned into my internal navigation system a decade ago, I park in front of my house, and turn off the headlights.

It is a struggle to stop myself from unbuckling. It is a battle to stay in the car, and not go traipsing through the backyard to find the garden key under a stone, and go in through the porch door. Because this is no longer my house. Those bushes are new, the front door is a different shade of green, and there's a different car in the driveway. Complete strangers live here now, in my living room and kitchen, and I am completely unaware of their existence –
that is, until I start thinking too much late at night and end up back here again.

This course of travel is useless, and serves me no purpose, other than to feed a growing sense of nostalgia as the years slip by. And I cannot simply delete it out of my brain, nor the muscle memory from my body.

Haunted by empty roads, I put the car in reverse and find the way back to my home in this time period, still looking for the moon that has been there for me always.

write

I’m a writer.

I write stuff down

In notebooks, on paper napkins, on skin.

I find the paths unwalked and wade on through

Never stopping for a moment to consider turning around.

I weave words together, and temper them like cold iron

So when they reach your hands, they will know just how to pierce, or heal.

I create the landscapes you see in your own dreams

Memorizing where I wander when I stare off into space.

I paint with my hands in colors I discovered as a child

Borrowing from nature or the tall structures man has devised for himself.

I hold up colored glass to my eyes, to see the world in a different light,

Watching the shadows of a sunset in a strange hue of green

And it is what keeps my heart alive when I discover I am confined.

You must understand –

I’m a writer.

I write stuff down.

I cannot be tamed, or cured.

You must let me run my course;

I am Chaos.

I am not dangerous in small doses, I promise.

But someone may have been waiting their whole life for what I have to say,

For what I see as truth and beauty, bound together and inseparable,

May save their life

Or change their mind.

Do not hold me back.

I am a writer.

I write stuff down.