kid things
I stopped talking for long enough that I wondered if the myths of my childhood would disappear, too.
Who will tell the story of when I marched across a house at two years-old to right the wrong of my stolen, defunct camera, or Cameron’s grin at age four for pilfering graham crackers on a playgroup mat? Who will know Nicole’s eyebrows turned pink when she cried and that was adorable every time she cried, to the point that we named her Pinkbaby and nothing felt serious when she looked up at us from her carseat?
I had a friend on the schoolbus that ran into her sister’s teeth, giving her a scar like a small inchworm on her forehead. Izzy, the friend that made me feel rage and defiance and adoration and thrill in tandem with her undulating expressions of affection. Izzy with her blue teeth after we ate warheads with our braces on, had at least two different color pair of Converse and thought little of the words “similar” or “different.”
The tea parties I orchestrated for each younger member of family, placing a blanket on the living room floor and fitting them with hats from the play box. I wore playclothes when I got home from school each day and I wish jeans today still risked a renegade splash of paint.
I rose early on the weekends for to mix applesauce and 4 raw eggs and food coloring with my friend D’Arcy. I believe my first experience of anxiety was waiting for my mother to find I had snuck my friend into her room, used her shaving cream on our heads and faces to appear like old men, and ran out without missing that a pack of violet gum rested on her dresser and she had laid out a gold necklace already for work.
I approached her with my foam beard, Winnie the Pooh underwear my only other adornment. She laughed and her eyes flashed with severity, a combination that made me feel tiny and vexing. I had the disarming awareness that I could make her laugh off of most levels of anger. Never punishment, though. I spent Saturday afternoons spent seething in my room, pink walls and animal posters witness to volcanoes of spite. I felt the brand of rage that balks at pure injustice and crumples into a more useable form. I wrote and found relief in my invented worlds.
And now, here I am, wrapped in a white hotel comforter, waiting for my voice to come back since “I used to be funny” reigns supreme in my head, and I hope beyond hope that the folklore bridging my entertained face as a five year-old to my quickness to blot out charm today will hold, since they are beautiful stories though they are sometimes sad.
In the face of darkness, kid things can seem like the prelude to defeat. On further consideration, they feel giddy, like the first time wind bolts through the leaves in fall.
