I wasn’t sure
by Nelly W.
Surefooted walking over rocks along lake champlain, my lithe tall body, with my legs in a french cut bathing suit, I am from here, I don’t know how old I am
I have memories of these places, of inside of trailers at a sleepover, of Haley’s comet, and Hale Bop,
Smokefilled living rooms watching Night of the Living Dead as first graders where there is Sammy Hagar Van Halen and a place in the basement to rollerskate to Madonna
I know the woods, and I walk the new trails
I have followed a dog to see the crocus and the larch,
and the plastic among the mulch
I had a dead battery, a wrong map, no x marks the spot, and I was terribly afraid to find my way back to the shores, so I have made every excuse, but not for my behavior.
This is where I was hurt.
I have no friends from high school. Heck, the only real friends I have are recovery buddies; they are the only ones who know how to be sneaky and to call me, so I can drop the mask with them. We have the same one that we picked up as some party favor, and so we can hand it over when the next one exits the rooms.
The relived violence, mostly to myself again. Missing the mark, getting here and trying to escape rather than leaning in to the experience. Ingrate brat.
And so all the murder I did in my head on so many, not following the routes, have come to this terminus.
I lacked curiosity: no investigations or explorations, just contempt prior to investigation:
old tapes and all loops– I have to take a step back to see.
Still, logic slams down feelings like a wet dough I have to punch at for a while.
I know that I have to assemble all of the little parts of me to have enough. It’s gonna take some substance to get a job, or wake with the alarms, got to put my big girl pants on, gotta move away again, turn the key, get the engine sparked to restart my life.
But as I go pensively, I rediscover this broken shell of myself along the water, or this little splintered rock that I would have crushed into make up pretending to be a native woman splashing in the waters, making mud pies, I do not know how old I am.
I am attracted to the shiny. I panned for gold at a tourist spot in California so I thought all gold was the shiny bits in even Lake Champlain. The parts that are me are so fragmented; yet they are glitter. I am assembling them fleck by fleck sifted through my fingers into a goldfish gladlock from a prize booth at the Franklin County fair circa 1992. I will be squishy for a while, as a bobble, and glurp to interviews, and I will scintillate.
When they announced it in the staff newsletter that I had resigned, when really, my job wasn’t renewed, people congratulated me for making the decision to get out. Did I see how sick this was making me? No fault of their own, but my mad head of lead could not think of a kind and gracious response.
Do you know where you are going?
I know it is not here anymore.
But I wasn’t sure.
