i’m listening to a girl talk about
how she speaks different now,
does things differently,
acts differently,

and it catches my attention. 

she continues to explain
to the person she is with
that she is a recent american. 
she happens to be very proud
to be a us citizen, but part of her
misses who she used to be,
where she came from, just a bit. 

which i understand,

but at least
she is sure.

what she left behind
was worth leaving behind
for what she became. 

and she’ll probably forget
what it was like to to be
who she used to be. 

she’ll remember,
but she’ll forget too. 
it won’t be with her everyday,
every moment, with every step. 

she’ll become so much an american that
she won’t remember being anyone else,
except in the occasional rare moment.
already, she said she wouldn’t know how
to fit back into the place she left . . . .

and hopefully that means that she won’t have

to live with the ghost of who she once was.

we all have so many important stories to tell and it is not often enough that we get to tell them. how often have you been asked to tell someone about a certain time in your life?  the only stories we ever hear are those of the very old.  and that’s not because only the very old have interesting stories, often enough their stories are ordinary, overheard or boring, but we listen.  because for some reason we have decided that the years in their stories garner some sort of respect that makes us sit down and listen, interesting or not.  and sometimes, they tell great stories, other times, we have to fight falling asleep.  but, i think the important part is not in the hearing of the story, but in the telling.  we all need an outlet where we can tell our stories and have someone hear them.  an allotted period of time where we can feel that our experiences (however painful, inspiring, momentous, or insignificant) served some purpose.  we shouldn’t have to wait until we’ve reached a certain age to start having people pay attention when we share our lives.

she retold the story. coldly, without expression. a story that maybe they hadn’t heard before, despite all the different stories she told. But, an important story. one of the most traumatic stories she knows about those days. and as she told it, she couldn’t believe how detached she was. usually the mere mention of that day brings a shiver down her spine and tears to her eyes. today, though, she must have needed the four years between her and that moment. today, if she could have told the story in third person, as if it hadn’t happened to her at all, she might have felt more emotion. instead, she sat with her back to a wall, knees pulled into her chest, staring into the empty space, and she spoke words. words, that’s all they were. separate, meaningless words, that as far as she could tell, didn’t even fit together well enough to tell the story of that day. when she was done, when there were no words left in the story, she felt like she hadn’t done the experience justice. the girl in the story felt cheated. like she had been part of some news report that contained only facts and no substance. and she wanted it to have more meaning than just that.

blurred. smeared. smudged. ruined
crumbled. torn. and coffee stained.
taken carelessly, ripped unevenly,
from the pages of a forgotten journal.
a piece. a single version. partial.
incomplete, incoherent. rambling.

“thank God every morning when you get up that you have something to do that day which must be done. whether you like it or not.”…charles kingsley

monday morning will come.  despite  never getting around to doing any laundry or the fact that last week was too long and this weekend too short.  monday morning will come.  the alarm will go off and i’ll have things to do, places to be, people who will expect me to show up.  the other thing that never fails each monday is that whether it’s standing in line at starbucks or walking into work, someone is grumbling about it being monday morning.  and while i fully understand the sometimes dreadful feeling that monday morning can bring, the disappointment when you realize that you can’t hit the snooze “just one more time”, or the hesitation in your voice just before acknowledging that you’ll have to have that coffee to go, there is also a bit of comfort in it for me.  thank God, that i have somewhere to be, something to do, a reason to exist, for without it … well, monday would just be another day in a string of blurry, gray, meaningless days.

she liked grande allegro best.  it required all of her, every ounce of energy she had left after a long tiring class that had already taken everything she thought she had.  but, she loved grande allegro.  how warm her body felt, how her muscles all came together to allow her to propell her weight into the air, flying, suspended at the very top for just a moment, and then finally landing gracefully back on her feet.  some classes, some days even, knowing that she had the strength to soar like that, even when her body felt like collapsing, was all that she needed to keep going.  hell, some days it was all that she needed to get out of bed and begin at all.  the only problem was that these days she couldn’t remember the last time she had made it through a grande allegro and wasn’t sure that she still could.  she wanted to remember.  but some things have to be felt in your body, not just imagined up in your head somewhere. the problem was, she wasn’t supposed to be in a ballet class and a grande allegro isn’t exactly something you can do between appointments where all you do is sit on couches.  she was beginning to realize why it was she didn’t have a couch of her own.  she’d had had enough of couches these days.

she wanted to know what would happen if you tried to run a car on empty.  she’d never quite let it get that low and she wondered if it stopped right a way or if it would coast on fumes and luck for a bit before puttering out completly.  she had never had much faith in luck, but still she wanted to know.

she saw life through her rearview mirror. always checking behind her to make sure she hadn’t accidently hit anything.

she wanted to get on with her life, already. and she didn’t want to do everything that was messy and endless before she began.  she wanted to go, now, before anything else stopped her. but she wasn’t sure where to go or how to skip all the messy parts she disliked so much. 

she thought that if she took more than one step at a time, she’d get there faster. but, instead, she just got tired, missed a few too many stairs along the way, tripped over her own feet and ended up flat on her face, not quite at the bottom again.  after that she couldn’t quite find her footing and even one step at a time seemed like just about one too many stairs at a time, like all of the time.  and so she wasn’t quite sure how she was going to start climbing again. 

she had had lots of answers once. to big questions. like why babies die and why children end up in horrible families and why really bad things happen to nice people.  she still had answers to things like that.  but she couldn’t figure out why having the answers didn’t make any of it any better.  that’s what she couldn’t quite explain.

it was just too damn complicated, she thought.  and she didn’t think there was enough coffee in the world to sort this problem out in her head.

she had this life that had been taken from her. not one piece at a time, but all the pieces of it, poof, gone, vanished, into the thin air, all at once.  she wanted it back, undamaged.  but she didnt’t have any idea where to begin looking for things that had disappeared like that.  she couldn’t even explain how it had happened.  and she was afraid that you couldn’t file a missing life report with the local police department.