Lines, Part I

When I was so small that my feet couldn’t even touch the floor, I would look down at your heels. In the mornings, I would come down the stairs, hopping patiently (the only time I have ever been able to wait wait wait for anything), sat with dad at the breakfast table. The sound that graham crackers make when you break them in half at seven o’clock in the morning: the funny feeling up and down your spine as you spread creamy peanut butter and it gets stuck on the edge of your plate, wedging itself under your fingernails, and now — oops! The smell of peanuts following you around all day.

Mama, did you ever look down at the lines on the heels of your feet? I was. And that’s how I saw it all. The city streets that you ran down when you were my size, sometimes followed by cars and other times: chased by dogs. I could see you running after something. Imagining the picture of you following after your own future daughter, who ran around wildly in circles, trying to catch a bird in her tiny hands. The story of how your feet rubbed against concrete as you grew up — grew older — and let the earth etch itself upon your once soft skin. Your histories chiseled into the back of your foot, for you to never forget, yet all of it hidden in a place that you must have never looked.

Now I am all grown up, but the other day at the breakfast table:

Dad, flipping the pages of a magazine as he drank his morning coffee. I’ve been listening to the sound of glossy pages rub against one another all this time, don’t you know?

You, biting into an apple slice, the sound of the fruit crunching against your teeth, the early light shining on your hair: greying fast, yet not showing even the slightest sign of thinning.

And now: me, with a woman’s body that sometimes seems two sizes too big, sitting cross-legged the way I did when my feet couldn’t quite touch the ground. Listening to the crunch flip crunch flip crunch flip that is a reduction of my childhood into two short, ever-forgettable sounds. The very sounds that I will miss first when you are both gone and I have nothing else to remember you by.

Me and my little soul — which you have always told me is too delicate, too innocent to handle the cruelty of this world (You better get tougher, or else they will eat you alive out there) — sit at this end of the table, head hanging in a half-sleep, until I look down and spot the lines on your heels and and the patterns on the soles of your feet and am forced to remember how far I have to go.

Here we are in this meadow, an empty field, someone else’s land to nurture and nourish, the two of us surrounded by honeysuckle — the nostalgia of its taste on your lips, memories of a stickiness on your tongue that, can you taste it?, takes you back to being a little kid once again.

And the wildflowers. If we were to draw this picture together, we’d take the grassy-colored crayons and push down the wax onto the paper, one green stem after another, our hands sprouting nature into existence.

In the middle of all of the prim roses, daisies, violets, look at me. And with your eyelashes coax me, ask me, beg of me — to trust you.

Look — over there. See the bales of hay that we might be able to roll down the hill together if only we could bring ourselves to just 
1) close our eyes
2) take a deep breath, and 
3) leap forward to finally get a little bit of a running start?

The way that the hay runs around in a circle, until the lines all come together to one little point of being, the crux of it all, the heart of the matter: you and me, standing here.

Feel — the way that the lines on my palm intersect with yours. You are your own city, and I am mine, and when our hands come together, we form a metropolis where nothing is laid out in any order, but the streets all take you wherever it is that you want to go. My hand is slippery in yours (“You’re sweating,” you point out to me), the way that rain flows down between the edge of a the curb and down into the gutter, hiding from the skyscrapers, softly escaping into the sewers and out into the quiet, welcoming open sea.

Listen — to my secret. The one that I want to lean in and tell you as we stand here with bees buzzing around our heads. The story of how I ended up in this place, too afraid to let anyone cross the boundaries that you don’t even know exist yet. The truth: that there are more lines here than you can see. Lines that divide the things that make you, you. And make me: me.

The lines around me swirl and spin, suck me in. They surround me in concentric circles, as though I were pinned to the center of a dart board. And as you draw near to me, that’s how I can tell how much it will hurt — are you going to be the one that finally pins me down here forever?

The way that the lines around me pull me down, I feel like I’m circling a drain, with the inevitable end of being sucked away.

How do you push away that feeling (the one where you feel like you are drowning and everyone is peering down at you from the edge of the pool) so that you can keep gasping for a little bit more air?

You build the lines up: into walls.