Childhood games, such as “boys catch the girls,” taught us how to behave and what to feel about ourselves. It taught us that we are not important unless we are pursued.
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It trembles in my diaphragm.
The stretch and turn of muscle
guiding sound,
It was over a year later that I realized what had happened. It may sound strange to you that I didn’t know it had. Wouldn’t you know if that kind of thing had happened to you? I wasn’t unconscious or inebriated. I remembered that evening, those moments in that room, but I didn’t realize it had happened. Because it wasn’t the kind of thing I was taught about in health class. Instead, I was taught about herpes and genital warts and obesity.
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Train station toilets and hospital rooms, especially bed seven, smell the same. Like chlorine and baking soda and coercion and cold. I’m seventeen and I wear my school uniform. No - she wears her school uniform, three layers of khaki and stockings. He wears a suit and carries an umbrella.
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Over a decade ago, I had a best guy friend with whom I shared a great deal of my life. He was the picture perfect, textbook “nice guy.” Unfortunately, as is common, when someone seems nearly too good to be true, they often are. This guy was my best friend. And I his. I had always suspected that he wanted more than my friendship, but I wasn’t interested in taking our relationship to that place. I thought this was something that he would respect. I was wrong.
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A body barely breathed
Inhale
A lizard lands
Exhale
His eyes give fire
On an August day in 1988 I walked home from my summer job at the Farish Street YMCA. I was fifteen and a freshman in the Lanier High School band. Dressed in shorts and a t-shirt I moved along the sidewalk of Monument Street quick and unresponsive to the honking horns and catcalls from the fluid noon traffic. A man in torn blue jeans walked towards me with a brown bag in hand. He brought the bag to his lips then howled when he returned it to his side. He looked at me then said,” GOOD STUFF!”
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It’s been a while. A lot has changed since we were in second grade. I’ve fallen in love a few times, in different ways. I’ve said some “I love you”s and said some “I love you too”s and also kept some of them to myself. You know how it goes. However, you should know that when I think of love I still think of you. You were my first “I love you” to someone that wasn’t family.
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Do you remember how we first met? It was an impromptu double date. One of your roommates was trying to hook up with one of my best friends, and my apartment was off campus. I pierced my nose that night, just for the fun of it, and you stopped by for an hour or so. We ended up thrown together several more times over the next few months. And before I realized what was happening, I fell in love with you.
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When the breeze blew cold, the sun shined bright, and the room filled with tears of happiness, you were holding a little girl in your arms. Your arms that were warm enough to cuddle her that rainy and chilling July. Your fingers that lingered over her head and a kiss you planted on her forehead. She was lucky enough to come into this world and call you her “Papa.” I am proud to be that grown up little girl of yours.
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I’m using the names we picked for ourselves in French class all those years ago because technically I’m not even supposed to think about you. It’s been nearly two decades after all, and I’m supposed to have grown up, moved on, and all that jazz. Well. I am married – happily, I promise. But I can’t deny what our few years together meant, and I’m only recently realizing I don’t think I ever told you how much.
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My parents called a family meeting in early December. They wanted to discuss an idea for the coming holidays. A neighborhood family was having a hard time and would probably not have a traditional Christmas with presents or fancy dinners.
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I still dream about the band room at Paul Revere Junior High, sixty years later. I see you now, sitting at the cluttered desk in your little office. The new school just opened and my mother insisted I join the band, even though I had been playing the clarinet only a few months. I was thirteen and in the eighth grade, a porky, insecure, introverted kid.
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You remember your father’s fingers curling around the head of your new born baby. They are long, the nails rectangular and pared, clean pink and white, like the baby. Her head fills one of his hands and he uses the other to cradle her body neatly to him. He has his hands full, which is why, when the tears start to leak out of his eyes, he has to turn away, towards the window in the corner of the hospital room.
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I’m sixty-three years old and in unchartered territory on this day of my birth.
• Old enough for Social Security, not old enough for Medicare.
• Old enough to be called “retired,” not old enough to be considered “an elder.”
• Physically (i.e., how I feel) too old for the Iron Woman Triathalon, but not too old for Advanced Yoga.
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I have always been terrified. Jumpy. Unsettled. Waiting. Expecting something to go wrong. The scariest place for me has always been my own mind—its ability to morph something ordinary into something terrifying.
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The problem with sleep paralysis is that no matter how much you know about it and how easily you can dismiss the things that happen as a side effect of coming out of REM sleep the wrong way, when it’s happening it can still feel like a ghost attacking you.
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Officially, I do not believe in ghosts. Unofficially, I eat that stuff up. If someone has a ghost story to tell, I want to hear about it. Tapes of ghostly words? I’ll listen! (heart pounding, head under covers). Pictures? Yes, please. It is perhaps true that I have seen every episode of Paranormal State.
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My midlife crisis arrived like a midnight locomotive a decade later than expected. I gazed at myself in the mirror and realized it was time to face reality. I looked just like the woman who had given me advice all my life. Make room for Mama!
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A well-worn path leads straight to the back door of my ninty-eight-year-old neighbor, Rose. When my family and I planned a move to the area, she was the first person I met. Earlier that day she had returned from her final visit to the doctor who performed her hip replacement surgery.
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