the pieces left behind

I have this memory from when I was a kid and she was still alive. We used to walk to school together every day. Most days she met me at my house and then we’d walk together from there, or my mom would drive us. It was our little morning ritual, and my mom used to joke that Aimee was like her other daughter. But on this morning, when we left for school and started walking down the road, Aimee realized her cat had followed her down the street. He was a black cat and his name was Smokey. We both tried to pick the cat up and bring him home, but he was determined to stay outside. He clawed and scratched and eventually made Aimee cry. She ran home to tell her parents about it and they told her to go to school, that they would handle the cat. So we did. I don’t know why the memory sticks out so much to me now. Maybe it’s the way my brain stored the memory of her forgiveness; even though that cat left scratches on her arms, she still loved it. She had a big heart. She taught me that.

The little gray cat I have now is sleeping in my lap as I type this. After she died I swore I’d leave this state, get away from the memories of her. I passed her old house every day on the way to school and looked away from the pain of it. She didn’t die there, but a piece of her did when her parents divorced and moved away. I didn’t realize it until it was too late for me to help her. That ate me alive, the guilt of it, it burned a hole in my heart and my soul, a deep well of grief that I can always call upon if I need it but can never put away when I don’t want it. I thought it was because of my proximity to where it happened, where we grew up and where I had to grow up without her; but when I tried to leave I couldn’t, and I bounced straight back to Minnesota as if there were strings connecting me to her, tying me here where she last walked the earth and lived and breathed and laughed. And it feels like she took those things from me when she died—a piece of me died with her. And the piece that’s left doesn’t quite know how to live and breathe and laugh without the weight of this interminable grief. Doesn’t quite know how to love anymore.

Memory Lane

What’s it look like? How did you get there?

I walk down memory lane every day. It’s a sunny day and my father and mother are outside, doing some kind of work amongst the flowers, hardly speaking, working in tandem. It’s the sound of a basketball bounced against pavement, the hesitant dribble and the missed shot. It’s the sound of the neighborhood children, gone now, bikes and scooters clattering noisily down the quiet street, filling the spaces with shouts and laughter. It is those four old friends trudging down the same path every day, talking about nothing and reliably waving hello. It is the feeling of the wind on my face and my hair blown back and the sheer exhilaration of riding my bike down Holly Hill.

Memory lane is sunny, memory lane is dark. Sneaking boys in and out of the basement, the tearful goodbye of young love, the desperation to feel something, so strong some nights I would walk into a storm, abandoning pretenses and clothing, and shout my sorrow to the world from the safety of the back yard. Some nights I tore at my skin, leaving scars to give me directions back to this place, to remind me where I came from, to blot out my pain with an old sock or a piece of tissue. Some nights I shook so hard I couldn’t make a sound, some nights I cried for help. Some nights, some nights. Take the bad with the good and you have memory lane.

I will return here always I will not forget where I came from no matter how hard I may want to. The tall oak trees and the gentle waterfall, the stillness and the noisiness, I may hate it but I love it too, for I was once happy here. It has gone wrong, but even with the bad, I was once happy. So I return, desperate to understand. What more can we do with this life than try to understand?

Sunrise, sunset

It goes round and round.

I don’t understand people who think sunrises and sunsets are the same, nor do I understand the people who think every sunset and every sunrise have little variation. To me, every rising and falling light is unique. Predictable, sometimes? Yes. On a cloudy day, it is only expected that the sky will gradually darken, but sometimes a few rays of light escape the heavy blanket and set the sky on fire–sheer unpredicted brilliance. The sun has marked my days and nights, as it has for millions of people for millions of years.

That summer, I thought the sun would never set, and you gave the colors their meaning. We danced and played in the warmth of an endless sunset, or was it a sunrise, I still don’t know. Was what happened an ending or a beginning?

The night it happened, the earth stopped spinning, I swear. The colors dulled or maybe I was blinded to their beauty, stained with your darkness. I still try to figure out how you hid it so well, I was so wrong about you. It makes me angry to this day, I lash out and meaninglessly strike out at the endless night. Yesterday, I threw darts and imagined every time I hit the bullseye it was your face, and you were mangled and bloody by the end of it. When I get angry like this, I feel like I get even more stuck in the darkness, further and further from my sunrise. I miss the light I thought you were, but I shudder at the thought of getting close to another again. I feel as mangled and bloody as I imagine your face, and I feel like someone is throwing darts at me, hitting me with precision as I try to outrun my own thoughts, my own head. A thankless task. I still don’t know if the sun will ever rise and end this fucking nightmare.

Light Switch

Write about coming out of the dark and seeing the light.

That night, the switch flipped. I saw who you really are, and it wasn’t remotely close to what I thought. How did you hide it so well? How did you so neatly slide into my life, exactly what I needed at exactly the right time? Sometimes I feel rigid, unchangeable–if something or someone doesn’t fit into my life, I leave it behind. If I don’t know what someone wants, I walk away. You were the opposite. You changed yourself for me, you became what I wanted. You didn’t earn my trust, you didn’t convince me to break down my walls–you lodged yourself inside me, planted the seeds of evil and hate and nurtured them until they choked me, drowned me, tore me to pieces. I only realized when it was too late, and by that time, you were poised for the kill.

Of all the people who ruined me, you are the one I regret the most. I loved you and now I wish I never met you. I look for you in the men I’m suspicious of, the ones I think may mean me harm. When I was in the dark, I couldn’t see you at all. Now, in the light, I see you everywhere. You’re with me everywhere, a 10-pound weight, impossibly strong chokehold. Did you do it on purpose? Or I was a victim of opportunity, a casualty in the phase of your ‘dumb youth’?

I hope someday to be able to wish even you the best. But now, in the wake of the fury of the fire, I am still smoldering, embers still hot, and if you ever come near me again, I swear I will burn you myself so badly and thoroughly that you don’t even remember your name the next morning.

This is how much I hate you.

Insult

Write about being insulted. How did you feel? Why do you think the other person insulted you?

Anger? Sadness? Indignance? Just plain confusion, mostly, is what I feel initially. It always slightly surprises me, probably because the insulter is assuming that I actually care about their opinion. Then, I kind of think on it for a while because, who knows maybe they’re right! I really do spend quite a bit of time running around in circles in my head, defending and tearing myself down. My ego wants to tell me they’re full of shit, and my depression always just kind of whispers “Hey maybe they’re right though.” Most of the time, I just don’t do anything about it. I smoke some weed, eat about a ton of buttered popcorn until I’m so full I can’t see and pass out watching Downton Abbey.

Sounds

Sit outside for an hour. Write about the sounds you hear.

I hear an owl past its time, hooting in the distance. The singing of thousands of other birds greeting the sun from their perches and nests. Of the train, brakes squealing against the tracks as it comes to an angry stop. The honking of migratory geese returning north for the sweet summer. The sound of the mighty river, wending its way from bank to bank, carrying loads of sediment all the way to the terminus. The distant highway that will carry me far from this place in just a moment’s time.

morning on the yellowstone river

The Professor

Write about a teacher who has influenced you.

She was a stout, grey-haired lady with a deep belly laugh and an affinity for Shakespeare. She was good-natured an understanding, something that god knows I needed in the spring of my freshman year in high school. After three hospital visits, including a week-long stay, I was falling behind, half the assignments in the gradebook marked missing. I distinctly remember her pulling me aside one day and daring to share a bit of her soul to a 15-year-old: “Everyone told me to pull myself up by my bootstraps, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t even reach my boots.” Later, we were assigned a paper on a personal story–not a practice college assignment, but practice in the kind of personal storytelling college essays would require. I spilled everything in my trembling 9th-grade soul to this slightly odd English teacher, and when I handed it in, god bless her, she said: “I bet it has a happy ending.” When I had her again, after all that, she shaped my writing so powerfully that I attribute my recent successes on my papers to her. She wrote the recommendation letter that got me into this Honors Program. This stout, grey-haired lady believed in me.

But it was my short, mother-hen French teacher who saved my life. Who noticed when I left class, put two and two together, who called the office, my parents, alerting my father to the fact that I have braved the February winter to walk home and take handfuls of pills. She saved my life–she found my life worth saving. Je te devois ma vie. That kind of love from a  teacher is hard to find, but I owe a lot to that elusively powerful kindness in teachers who notice you, who care. Although the memories I have are fleeting and do not resurface often when they do, I think of them fondly and treat them with love, examine them carefully, and gently fold them up and tuck them away again. I am not that girl anymore–I can be trusted with locked doors and sharp razors and scary high ledges. I do not need advice on how to want to be alive any longer. I want to be alive. I just need someone to tell me how. They gave me all the why I need.

Shadow

Imagine you are someone’s shadow for the day.

I imagine myself sometimes, following you around. Sick thought, I know. I should want nothing to do with you. But something about you keeps drawing me back to you, drawing my mind and my thoughts back to you. I think it’s the confusion, the mystery. My feelings about you are shrouded in these things. My head cannot comprehend, and therefore I cannot let go.

So I follow you through your days, sometimes. You wake up, dress yourself and feed yourself, drive through snowy grey streets to class, fight the frigid cold of Minnesota from building to building. You go to work, the night shift, 10-6. You fit me into your life so neatly, at exactly the time you wished. It was to keep me out, to remind me if my role in your life. But it let me in in a way you never expected. You go to school. You go to work. You buy groceries and pay rent. You do the same things as the rest of us but it’s different because it’s you. It’s you.

I want to know your mind, and I’m scared to. I’m afraid of what you showed me the night everything changed. I’m afraid to dig further, to find the root of the weed, to shake off the soul and expose all the complexities and ugliness. I do not want to see how that plant may have twisted and mutated into something so greedy and evil. I do not want to know what has to happen to a person to twist and mutate like that.

I may never comprehend you; you may be incomprehensible, as so many things in this world are. I will stay in the shadows until I am ready. I do not have to comprehend you; I only need to comprehend that you are a poison, a weed that chokes sunlight out of my garden. I am in your shadow now, but I will not be there for long.

Smoke, Fog, and Haze

Write about not being able to see ahead of you.

Not being able to see in front of you, future-wise–as in not knowing what your immediate future holds–is both terrifying and freeing. On the one hand, society tells us we should always have some sort of plan for the next five years. At this stage in my life, it should be to get a degree, maybe go to grad school, and get an entry-level job somewhere, hopefully in a field that relates to your degree. But I’m definitely not going to get my degree in the next 4 years, let alone go to grad school. Why does life have to be linear? Why can’t I adventure now and work later? Why do I have to commit to one thing forever? How am I supposed to know what I’m really good at when I’m 20-something years old? I’ve done so little in this life, it feels a betrayal to tie myself down.

However, I am scared. I’m scared for my future, I’m scared of screwing up, I’m scared of falling. But my future isn’t going to just stop because I need time to man up. I might be scared of the unknown, but I’m still going to take the unknown head-on. Not being able to see in front of you is terrifying. But it also gives you courage, and that is irreplaceable.

Great Minds

Write about someone you admire and you thought to have a beautiful mind.

She has a galaxy in her head and the wind at her back, she’s small but she’s ready for you, world, she’s taking you head on. No land is too distant, no corner too remote for her roaming heart. She’s searching, searching for something, the answer to a question, perhaps. Sometimes, she is sure this is her purpose, the answer to this unimaginable question she longs to ask. Other times, she roams aimlessly through the lonely woods, isolation her dark friend. The darkness need not make her tremble, she brings light wherever she goes. She will never truly be lost, not so long as she carries the heart of the pine within her and stays low to the ground. Beautiful, kind spirit, passionate and awkward and lovely, great mind

my best friend.