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.

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.

thanks ms.thomas.