Sometimes in the shower I
look
down at my hands and tell myself I’m
going to be an entirely different person that day, as if it was
as simple as washing yourself down the drain. Sometimes I look up
at the shower head and remember a time when my mother coaxed me
into getting showers by telling me water came out of the spigot
because there was an elephant spraying water from its trunk on
the other side of the wall.
I don’t remember time passing but all of the sudden my
hands got so big. The days all seem to run together like the
adjoining tracks of a train, and it’s only when I stop to
notice the distance from point A to point B that I realize how
much space has elapsed, how I’ll never again be quite small
enough to hide behind a laundry basket and I’ll never be
big enough to occupy the space in someone’s heart.
The water rolls awkwardly along my knuckles, the right one is
scabbed because I get angry and a lot of the time words just
won’t do. It’s just that sometimes skin and bones
feel more like a prison than a home and to try to convey that to
someone who doesn’t know how it feels to house an entire
hurricane in their body is impossibly frustrating. It’s
like trying to accurately describe a dream as it slips further
and further away, only to be later recalled in bursts. It is a
fear of mine, a time when people will remember me in bursts. But
I am most frightened of a time when I will only be able to
recollect my life in bursts.