bonfire

Is there a difference between flying and swimming, sensationally speaking? If I fold into an origami swan, I have three options: take flight, dissolve into fluid, or let you crush me in your palm. Only one is the wrong answer. And it’s the option I always choose. Do you remember back in middle school, how we’d play Sharks and Minnows and the pressure of the accusatory touch would deflate me to the point where I’d sink to the bottom just to feel the relief of buoyancy? Or the way my metatarsals would bruise the wood chips on the playground as I chased clouds on the swing set? I still swear I could fly before the age of four. Did you forget how it felt to take a deep breath and feel your stomach lift all the way to the moon? Did you forget how I’d lie in the sun, waiting for the beams to shrivel me like a Shrinky Dink? If I breathe through the correct nostril, and send the air to the correct lung, I can teleport back to the moment. I can feel my stomach drop out of my flesh the way an elevator with a broken cable plummets through the earth’s crust. My eyes die like stars and my heart turns to flames and I long to be amongst my brethren. Yes, with the right breath, I am once more leaping, leaping, always leaping toward the bonfire. I can never flick the channel off fast enough to let it end in the leap, no, I must always follow through, thrown back to the grass with the hard hit of a concerned arm to the stomach. That’s how the memory ends, whenever I chase it. But if I push, if I push push push through, I can bounce back to my feet and feel the smooth pavement drum a rhythm into my soles. And once more, another’s flesh takes me to the ground, demanding solutions that I will never have. Every morning, I awake on the front lawn at 10 PM, mouth agape with chaotic chortles, drowning in the acid rain. This is how it’s always been. I was infinite until age 12, when it all stopped making sense. I still replay all the violence that was never done to me. I still replay the way the eggs would have cracked against my skull and dripped down my face. I still hear the laughter they never got the chance to express at my expense. I still cry myself to sleep over the guilt. The sky is below and the land is above and nothing ever turned back around. My tear-stained cheeks never broke free, instead they stayed pressed to bone and brain that could never reconcile their differences. And the only blame to be placed is on adolescence and chemical imbalance. But that doesn’t heal the scars. If anything, it is a harder quilt to weave than one where the culprit is truly at fault. I cringe when I see a yield sign and get goosebumps when birds of paradise are mentioned. It has less to do with you and everything to do with the erasure of my own reflection, the silence of my own heart. You were my first real sin and no amount of penance could ever reform the castles inside of me. I am shattered like Humpty Dumpty. All the kings horses and all the kings men didn’t even try to put me back together again. They just trodded over me to play with their new Legos. I pay my taxes, but that does not entitle me to compensation. I wonder how much violence must actually be done to me before I feel my penance has been reached, and my prayers no longer feel like lies, and I can sleep without weeping once more.