Ode To The Red Boy

How do you deal with the unending feeling of things that must be done? Towels folded and put in the cabinet, dishes washed and dried on the rack, bills paid and sent to the post; done only a moment before the day is started again, the month is at its height, the year is born anew. How do you fight the tiredness, the weariness brought down by mundanity? How do you win?

That was when I met him. My undoing. He was like a father to me, but I was not like a daughter to him. He knew this. He knew what I saw when I looked into his eyes, and he did not look into mine, drawn into the gaps between my blouse’s buttons like black holes for morality. I was always to blame for his touches. I had always thought of myself as a girl, as a person, but really, I was a place. A place for innocence to die.

My age is, youngish, oldish? Depending on who you ask. I have time, and I don’t. The future is so far away and right outside my doorstep, and I’m just sort of here. Waiting for something to happen. Waiting to become my future self and grow out of all this childish shit. I have trouble discerning bad habits and personality traits, what grows from me isn’t all me after all. I have to take care with what I cull and what I cradle. I could become a walking quirk from middle school that I misidentified as wildly important to my sense of self and not just a random cultural reflex. What makes me myself? And how did it get there? What is genuinely me and what is grimly biding it’s time until I figure out it’s a stranger’s voice and not mine?

I belong to my animals as much as they belong to me. I am no owner, and they are no beasts.

A sudden calm washed over me

I felt no need to rush

To the finish line, to the next milestone, to anything ever again

My heart quieted for the first time in a long time

And beat gently in my chest, the way a child’s hand is held by her mother’s.

Taken by salt water taffy, bring me to the childhood I never had

She paws at the gentle glade’s hair, and twirls the green betwixt her fingers. Nothing tastes sweeter than the dew procured there, nothing hurts more than having to leave it.

There was a worse fate than death, I found, as the god I once worshipped laid his hands on my very soul.

To be unmade.

What happens to memories of broken places? Do they bleed too?

Her photo bends white at the creases, opened and closed a thousand times, my memories dull and taper away. I think of her. And I wonder what parts of her face I’ve forgotten in my desperate plea to remember every freckle on it.