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.
seafoam*