I remember when we used to play with small cars on your messy wood floor and drive them into our vast imaginations and through large forts made of patterned sheets and blankets. We were big like forest giants and small like black ants scuttling on the playground. We could fly out the tallest apartment window and endure the deepest waters of the public pool. We made it so we were invincible to the sounds of apartment tenants banging on doors and yelling parents and we were so absorbed in our happy little lives, for a little while until the night crept upon us; when I had to climb to the dirty top bunk and you laid underneath. You were my safety blanket keeping me warm from the cold chill of the sounds next door and when you fell asleep it was ripped off of me. I was left to fend for myself under your yellowing ceiling glistening with glowing stars.
When I woke you would always be there watching me with your big brown eyes and light brown face resting on the bed waiting for me to wake from my nightmares. Those nightmares we shared were not of those that six year olds usually have about things like giant rabbits and monsters in the closet. My terrors in the night were of being bullied for the rest of my life and that the hunger pains would never go away. Yours were of being kicked out onto the streets by your landlord and of being beaten by your dad. But these didn’t stop us because we knew that we nor any super hero could stop the inevitable. So instead we made our own lives; ones that only we could see. Ones where the streets of downtown were forests with skyscraping trees made out of street lights and where police where dangerous wild animals that could snatch us up and lock us away in small caves on the other side of town.
When we were finished with downtown we went out looking for new places to make believe, we walked passed the abandoned buildings falling in rubble and the smoking factories until we found a patch of green; a small woods in a city of smoke filled with new adventures and good memories. But when we stepped our little feet inside it wasn’t filled with forest animals and smells of pine but rather old furniture laying in a clearing of broken glass and used needles. Even with our disappointment we kept coming back because it was a soundless isolated cove that was all ours. We went everyday climbing trees and using our super powers in solitude were the non-believers wouldn’t see.
One day I didn’t sleep on that top bunk and didn’t accompany you down the long streets to our secluded world. I stayed in the man made one of older thoughts and rational thinking; the one that made us afraid to close our eyes. You walked passed the abandoned buildings and abandoned people forgetting your super powers back at home in your closet next to your cape and mask. Forgetting your sidekick.
You wandered in those dark woods feeling protected by the large trees and familiar furniture and didn’t give it a second thought when you saw that man sitting in our lazy boy living room chair. You must have thought that anyone that could see our world was nice and trustworthy but what you forgot is that there are villains and they live in the super hero world just like we did. You should have flew away the moment you saw him but you didn’t you pulled up a musty chair next to him in the clearing of glass and empty bottles of super glue. You asked him questions like how he knew about this place and he asked you the same when all of a sudden that dirty, scraggly old man jumped at you violently. He had the intentions of cutting out your tongue with a rusted knife that he drew from his pocket. He grabbed your mouth tighter to stop you from screaming and waking the neighbours. You kicked violently realizing your mistake and managed to break free of that high homeless man.
We don’t go into the woods anymore and now that we know the adult world can break into our make believe stories we stay out of there too. Now we are stuck in a world we don’t understand like strangers on a new and crowded planet. This world has grown between us making it hard to see you on days other then New Years Eve. All that I see of you on this one day is you blowing slow thick smoke and curse words from your lips.
Now when I sleep on that top bunk I cry myself to sleep and notice that those old stars have since been plucked from your sky. When I wake I don’t see your big brown eyes anymore so I curl up in my cotton blanket and run away into our old world; the one of super heroes and flying and of being happy. The one I used to run away in with you.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Ongoing Memory.
I used to like you before when you didn’t ask too much from me. Back when we played with bright finger paint on crisp white paper and had naptime. I would sit in the back corner furthest from anyone else, partner less in a hard plastic chair while that white haired lady told us how to behave. We became the best of friends you and I. We would hold hands in the playground and swing silently on those rusty swings and do things that children do. We would do crafts for mom and dad but mostly for mom and I would pretend it was just you and me. The crafts came home but mom and dad never came to see you and me. I didn’t like it when they did because they where dirty and smelled like cigarettes and weren’t very nice where as you were clean and smelled like grandma’s perfume and would never harm me. So I kept you to myself; and sooner or later I kept the crafts to myself too and silently shared them with you. I kept everything about you to myself: the feeling of being around you, the look of you, the smell of you, the sound of you.
I remember you had a piano big and beautiful. The wood glistened in the fluorescent light as soft melodies were sent into the air. I stared at those sparkling white keys enviously. I was forbidden to touch it so I sat there in my little flowered tights on the scratchy blue carpet as close as I could and listened to the sweet music. One day someone got too close; someone who didn’t care for the smooth chestnut coloured piano or the melodious songs it played and they so carelessly spilt juice on the polished wood and the milky white keys. They have since wheeled it away.
They wheeled away the fun and finger paint, the smell of cold apple juice and small muffins. They rolled up that old carpet and the bright art on the walls. They sent away the best parts of you and the good memories were lost in trash bags as they cleaned you out. Nothing was the same.
Our relationship has drastically changed; you are determined in bossing me around like I’m still that kindergartener and I obey out of fear of what will happen if I don’t. You work me until my hands are raw and bleeding and feet are blistered. When I finally fall asleep you rip me out of bed and dress my awkward body in those intolerable clothes. Then you pat me on the shoulder and fill my ears with hollow encouragement like a pep talk for a losing team before a game.
And now when I sit in the back corner on those hard plastic chairs I’m filled with anxieties and restlessness and I feel claustrophobic in your white-bricked walls. To pass the tedious hour I pull up your blinds and watch out your dirty windows as birds fly across the red-orange morning sky. I long to be those birds so free from you and everyone else and be able to fly away.
Everyday I look out your windows and watch new birds have new journeys as I soundlessly stay inside and when the white haired lady or the brown haired man in their navy blue suits walk by me they sigh and keep walking because I am not up to their standards. Their sighs collect inside of me like childhood collections of bugs in little glass jars, but like all childhood collections it will get to big and those sighs will over flow and trickle down my cheeks and leave puddles under my polished black shoes.
I remember you had a piano big and beautiful. The wood glistened in the fluorescent light as soft melodies were sent into the air. I stared at those sparkling white keys enviously. I was forbidden to touch it so I sat there in my little flowered tights on the scratchy blue carpet as close as I could and listened to the sweet music. One day someone got too close; someone who didn’t care for the smooth chestnut coloured piano or the melodious songs it played and they so carelessly spilt juice on the polished wood and the milky white keys. They have since wheeled it away.
They wheeled away the fun and finger paint, the smell of cold apple juice and small muffins. They rolled up that old carpet and the bright art on the walls. They sent away the best parts of you and the good memories were lost in trash bags as they cleaned you out. Nothing was the same.
Our relationship has drastically changed; you are determined in bossing me around like I’m still that kindergartener and I obey out of fear of what will happen if I don’t. You work me until my hands are raw and bleeding and feet are blistered. When I finally fall asleep you rip me out of bed and dress my awkward body in those intolerable clothes. Then you pat me on the shoulder and fill my ears with hollow encouragement like a pep talk for a losing team before a game.
And now when I sit in the back corner on those hard plastic chairs I’m filled with anxieties and restlessness and I feel claustrophobic in your white-bricked walls. To pass the tedious hour I pull up your blinds and watch out your dirty windows as birds fly across the red-orange morning sky. I long to be those birds so free from you and everyone else and be able to fly away.
Everyday I look out your windows and watch new birds have new journeys as I soundlessly stay inside and when the white haired lady or the brown haired man in their navy blue suits walk by me they sigh and keep walking because I am not up to their standards. Their sighs collect inside of me like childhood collections of bugs in little glass jars, but like all childhood collections it will get to big and those sighs will over flow and trickle down my cheeks and leave puddles under my polished black shoes.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Crosses Row on Row.
Music pumped from the basement vibrating my small bed, muting the sounds of strangers yelling through out the house. I would curl up in a ball and cover my ears with stuffed animals and rest my heavy eyes. The sounds of broken glass followed by screams started as the fights began. My body went rigid and I screamed into my pillows but no one heard, tears fell down my already swollen face. It was like this every night no matter what day Monday through Sunday. I was up until 4:30 but you never knew, you thought my room was somehow sound proof, like my thin blanket would protect me against the sounds of the disturbed land below but really it hardly protected me against the cold January nights because you forgot to put the heat on. I laid there in the black staring at my ceiling as the waves of sound spilled into my room; stars glowed green in the darkness.
When footsteps grew closer to my door I would scare myself into thinking it was that man you hid in my closet from the police that one night, but I knew he was in jail. He was in jail for putting someone in a coma for two weeks; which I thought was strange since he never went to jail for shooting at you with a shot gun. I guess you were too scared to tell anyone but me. Sometimes I’m glad you told me, sometimes I’m not, it means that there was someone to talk to you about it after, even if I was only 10 but it also means that I would be haunted by my own imagination as I picture the bullets fly passed your frightened face as they punctured the things around you nearly taking your life.
Sometimes I would sit on dusty hay bails in our old barn and stare at the bullet holes as they let in little stipples of light and imagine what it would be like if one had hit you. You would be cold as the concrete floor you stood upon and these would be the memories that I would be left with and I would know that when footsteps walked towards my door it wouldn’t be you coming to sing me to sleep. I would be an orphan; a child of the state but you could say that I’ve always been.
If you had died all those familiar strangers would leave and I would be alone in my abandoned house just the way you left it rotting milk, broken chairs and fine powders on little glass mirrors, stale beer would linger in the air like it always has. It would be like when you left for days on end but this would be forever. It would feel strange to hear the music stop and just the cold dead buzz of the speakers drill into my mind.
But you hadn’t died, those bullets whizzed right passed you and your only thought was that you had great luck because that was one more night to live it up. Some of these nights you would bring me with you when you couldn’t get a baby sitter. You would gently lay me down in a bed in one of the empty bedrooms in one of the strangers houses and you would tell me to go to sleep and not to worry then you would leave me in the still dark room. I would wait for the music to gradually creep under the door just like the thick twirling smoke that slowly asphyxiated me in the night.
I never slept; I laid there staring at the windows covered in tinfoil and watched dream catchers catch other people’s dreams because I wasn’t sleeping. I never slept, I couldn’t have slept I was scared to sleep because I knew that I would have peed the bed again and I was scared of you. You had the voice of a dictator loud and like an explosive it would destruct in my ears; you took many casualties many of them being my happy memories. You weren’t very forgiving and didn’t often care that I had a medical problem and I didn’t know how to fix it so I laid there in smelly, stained sheets tingling in exhaustion until 8am, when the filth had finally gone to bed.
Every time I opened the bedroom door I small sliver of light illuminated the room temporarily blinding me, sometimes I wished it had blinded me for I wouldn’t have to see what laid outside the door. People upon people unconsciously sprawled around the house groaning. Broken glass laid in shards on the floor beside puddles of puke that stung my nose. It felt like I was the last survivor in a war on these mornings, like my fellow soldiers had been brutally slaughtered in the night and I couldn’t even tell their families what had happened because couldn’t face them and tell them that I did nothing but count sheep while the battle raged on. I couldn’t stop the vicious war of drugs and I knew that more soldiers would be recruited the next day to play out the war like it had for the past two years.
One day the war will shoot you like the man in the closet but the bullets wont miss they will pierce your young skin. I will hammer in your white cross like all the other soldiers that had died in the war of drugs, and like all the other orphans that pray by the crosses row on row the war in my heart will end.
When footsteps grew closer to my door I would scare myself into thinking it was that man you hid in my closet from the police that one night, but I knew he was in jail. He was in jail for putting someone in a coma for two weeks; which I thought was strange since he never went to jail for shooting at you with a shot gun. I guess you were too scared to tell anyone but me. Sometimes I’m glad you told me, sometimes I’m not, it means that there was someone to talk to you about it after, even if I was only 10 but it also means that I would be haunted by my own imagination as I picture the bullets fly passed your frightened face as they punctured the things around you nearly taking your life.
Sometimes I would sit on dusty hay bails in our old barn and stare at the bullet holes as they let in little stipples of light and imagine what it would be like if one had hit you. You would be cold as the concrete floor you stood upon and these would be the memories that I would be left with and I would know that when footsteps walked towards my door it wouldn’t be you coming to sing me to sleep. I would be an orphan; a child of the state but you could say that I’ve always been.
If you had died all those familiar strangers would leave and I would be alone in my abandoned house just the way you left it rotting milk, broken chairs and fine powders on little glass mirrors, stale beer would linger in the air like it always has. It would be like when you left for days on end but this would be forever. It would feel strange to hear the music stop and just the cold dead buzz of the speakers drill into my mind.
But you hadn’t died, those bullets whizzed right passed you and your only thought was that you had great luck because that was one more night to live it up. Some of these nights you would bring me with you when you couldn’t get a baby sitter. You would gently lay me down in a bed in one of the empty bedrooms in one of the strangers houses and you would tell me to go to sleep and not to worry then you would leave me in the still dark room. I would wait for the music to gradually creep under the door just like the thick twirling smoke that slowly asphyxiated me in the night.
I never slept; I laid there staring at the windows covered in tinfoil and watched dream catchers catch other people’s dreams because I wasn’t sleeping. I never slept, I couldn’t have slept I was scared to sleep because I knew that I would have peed the bed again and I was scared of you. You had the voice of a dictator loud and like an explosive it would destruct in my ears; you took many casualties many of them being my happy memories. You weren’t very forgiving and didn’t often care that I had a medical problem and I didn’t know how to fix it so I laid there in smelly, stained sheets tingling in exhaustion until 8am, when the filth had finally gone to bed.
Every time I opened the bedroom door I small sliver of light illuminated the room temporarily blinding me, sometimes I wished it had blinded me for I wouldn’t have to see what laid outside the door. People upon people unconsciously sprawled around the house groaning. Broken glass laid in shards on the floor beside puddles of puke that stung my nose. It felt like I was the last survivor in a war on these mornings, like my fellow soldiers had been brutally slaughtered in the night and I couldn’t even tell their families what had happened because couldn’t face them and tell them that I did nothing but count sheep while the battle raged on. I couldn’t stop the vicious war of drugs and I knew that more soldiers would be recruited the next day to play out the war like it had for the past two years.
One day the war will shoot you like the man in the closet but the bullets wont miss they will pierce your young skin. I will hammer in your white cross like all the other soldiers that had died in the war of drugs, and like all the other orphans that pray by the crosses row on row the war in my heart will end.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Saturday, January 30, 2010
lasting memories
Every Tuesday and Thursday I wait for the sound of your old car rumble down my street. This meant you were here to visit me and take me out for the day. This was back when I was young and planned visits with you still existed in my life. Now I am older and don’t need your company. Sometimes on those lone days I stare out the window and wait for nothing and remember childhood memories with you. We often went to toy stores and you would buy me anything I wanted, I now realize that this was selfish of me since you had a low paying job and two other kids.
Those two other kids and I where the five year olds that you left in a wagon in the park one night. That night I lay in the cool grass with my brother and my sister not knowing if you would come get us or if someone else would take us away before you remembered. Long after the sun set and the stars came out to keep us company you came stumbling along beer in hand. We all got in the wagon and you towed us away without a word. We’ve never talked about this night, I don’t think anyone remembers or would believe me if I told them.
After some time, when you could truly be trusted with me, I would stay with your family and eat jello powder and stale bread for dinner, but I never told my mother about this. Your house was always really warm and like paved streets you could she the heat waves rise from the musty furniture. This heat stung my nose with the smell of beer and rotting food. Stains and cigarette butts littered the carpet I sat upon as I watched the only channel on our bunny eared TV.
Many a time I would try and build something out of the garbage and clutter on the coffee table beer caps, cigarette boxes, bits of string and cans. I did this in hopes that you would pay attention to the voiceless creature that I had become. It never worked. You were always too busy to sit with your me, so I sat lonely in your crowded living room.
Kids filled the house, my brother and sister so skinny you could see there bones sticking out under their clothes from having nothing good to eat. They sat there eating freezes from the local store as I sat at the kitchen table mute. You sat with them eating a white freeze getting annoyed at the small children.
As the night went on your music seemed to grow louder. The smoke filled the room with a cloud so intoxicating even to look at and it started to become harder to breath. I would curl up on the couch unable to sleep but desperate to close my dry eyes. I was only 10 but no longer could I shed tears for you, you had bleed the wells dry to a point of no return. Some time in the night the fight would start, slow at first but like a forest fire grow into something unmanageable. This created a rumbling in my heart matching the rumbling in my stomach, you would throw things at each other and when the glass shattered so did my love for you. When the filthy clock on the microwave hit 4:30 am, the fire would slowly burn out sending ashes to fall to the ground creating a thin layer of peace at last.
You would sit in solitude at the kitchen table and drink beer. I get a knot in my stomach as your head hits the table when you pass out, beer spilling on the floor. Minutes pass by as I decide to clean the beer and take your pulse. My grade four-health teacher taught me how to take a pulse this year. I am very grateful of her because now I know when you are alive and when you are dead. I grab your hand and we stumble to the couch where you take my place to sleep, but I don’t mind, I never sleep around you, I just keep taking your pulse.
Now you are too far away to take your pulse and at any given moment you could be dead and often there are close calls where I get woken up to the sad old voice of my grandfather on the telephone explaining the past events. It’s moments like these that I don’t think you realize that you have a daughter, a daughter filled with these memories and one day there will be no more new memories of you. I will be a full cup and you will be dead.
I don’t visit you in the hospital, I don’t know if you expect me to but I don’t want to see you broken face lie to me anymore. One day you will limp too far and your crutches will break and I wont be there to take your hand and lay you down to sleep.
Those two other kids and I where the five year olds that you left in a wagon in the park one night. That night I lay in the cool grass with my brother and my sister not knowing if you would come get us or if someone else would take us away before you remembered. Long after the sun set and the stars came out to keep us company you came stumbling along beer in hand. We all got in the wagon and you towed us away without a word. We’ve never talked about this night, I don’t think anyone remembers or would believe me if I told them.
After some time, when you could truly be trusted with me, I would stay with your family and eat jello powder and stale bread for dinner, but I never told my mother about this. Your house was always really warm and like paved streets you could she the heat waves rise from the musty furniture. This heat stung my nose with the smell of beer and rotting food. Stains and cigarette butts littered the carpet I sat upon as I watched the only channel on our bunny eared TV.
Many a time I would try and build something out of the garbage and clutter on the coffee table beer caps, cigarette boxes, bits of string and cans. I did this in hopes that you would pay attention to the voiceless creature that I had become. It never worked. You were always too busy to sit with your me, so I sat lonely in your crowded living room.
Kids filled the house, my brother and sister so skinny you could see there bones sticking out under their clothes from having nothing good to eat. They sat there eating freezes from the local store as I sat at the kitchen table mute. You sat with them eating a white freeze getting annoyed at the small children.
As the night went on your music seemed to grow louder. The smoke filled the room with a cloud so intoxicating even to look at and it started to become harder to breath. I would curl up on the couch unable to sleep but desperate to close my dry eyes. I was only 10 but no longer could I shed tears for you, you had bleed the wells dry to a point of no return. Some time in the night the fight would start, slow at first but like a forest fire grow into something unmanageable. This created a rumbling in my heart matching the rumbling in my stomach, you would throw things at each other and when the glass shattered so did my love for you. When the filthy clock on the microwave hit 4:30 am, the fire would slowly burn out sending ashes to fall to the ground creating a thin layer of peace at last.
You would sit in solitude at the kitchen table and drink beer. I get a knot in my stomach as your head hits the table when you pass out, beer spilling on the floor. Minutes pass by as I decide to clean the beer and take your pulse. My grade four-health teacher taught me how to take a pulse this year. I am very grateful of her because now I know when you are alive and when you are dead. I grab your hand and we stumble to the couch where you take my place to sleep, but I don’t mind, I never sleep around you, I just keep taking your pulse.
Now you are too far away to take your pulse and at any given moment you could be dead and often there are close calls where I get woken up to the sad old voice of my grandfather on the telephone explaining the past events. It’s moments like these that I don’t think you realize that you have a daughter, a daughter filled with these memories and one day there will be no more new memories of you. I will be a full cup and you will be dead.
I don’t visit you in the hospital, I don’t know if you expect me to but I don’t want to see you broken face lie to me anymore. One day you will limp too far and your crutches will break and I wont be there to take your hand and lay you down to sleep.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
BEAUTY.
Cool bumps shiver on my bare skin. Hair stands on end. My eyes open to see the things around me like a baby seeing for the first time. Things are bright, brilliant and new. They reach out to me with the gift of their presents as I do to them. As I sit here in as natural a state as I can be in my present position, I notice my body or lack there of because my body is everything around me. I am everything and everything is me, there is no difference. I used to think I was different but I now know that I am not, just my view is different and sometimes even that is not the case. I am just this magnificent thing and one day I will pass it on to someone or something else so they can live.
As my newborn eyes lift I see everything around me is beautiful, and it all just sits passionately waiting for someone to notice so they can share the beauty with them. It’s almost too much to bear; my eyes and my body want to burst with joy at this realization. If one can find good within all things then one can find good in themselves. At that I focus back to my body, the everything that I feel; my heart beats slowly, uselessly for it knows that this body will live no matter what. My skin tingles in relief as the clothes off my back are shed, and my eyes still in amazement shed a single tear.
If you are reading this remember you are everything.
As my newborn eyes lift I see everything around me is beautiful, and it all just sits passionately waiting for someone to notice so they can share the beauty with them. It’s almost too much to bear; my eyes and my body want to burst with joy at this realization. If one can find good within all things then one can find good in themselves. At that I focus back to my body, the everything that I feel; my heart beats slowly, uselessly for it knows that this body will live no matter what. My skin tingles in relief as the clothes off my back are shed, and my eyes still in amazement shed a single tear.
If you are reading this remember you are everything.
Friday, December 11, 2009
washed away.
This heart beats beside me, as it pumps the room full of blood, it slowly floods. The vital fluid laps at my feet calm and steadily. It gradually creeps up my legs and up to my waist soaking into my skin warming me from the outside in. Its up to my elbows now, I lay back and float in the liquid feeling the calming beat of the heart. As the moments go by I rise higher and higher to the ceiling. I take in my last few breaths slowly and sink to the bottom. I stay there as my body trembles and gasps for air not yet ready to die. Then there is calm. I open my eyes and feel my tingling body and at that moment I let the river wash me away.
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