written by Susan Rowe | illustrated by Jacopo Degl’innocenti
I’m sorry I yelled at you that time for knocking the picture off the wall. You with your gangly ten-year-old’s body, bounding down the stairs, arms outstretched in hopeful flight, like an albatross before its body lifts. Your fingers read the walls like Braille as you flew down those stairs, unaware of everything but the sensation of floating.
And then, I heard the craaack it made, saw the ugly “V” in the molding below. I held the picture loose in its frame and shouted at you for such mindless coming and going, my voice growing louder as anger revved. Your face flushed shame, then pain, then a mask slipped over your features, hiding you in plain sight.
I’m sorry I didn’t stop myself, that I didn’t want to. That for those moments it felt good to yell, a dragon unleashed inside me. I gave it free reign, even fanned the flames. I wonder, all these years later, what I was yelling at.
Not your flailing limbs, perfectly formed when I prayed you’d have ten fingers and ten toes, a body that leapt into air. Not your exuberance, those inviting campfires in your eyes. What enraged me so had nothing to do with you. I know that now, and I’m sorry.
Sorry, too, I didn’t see then what I see now, that I taught you to fear feeling, to take the edge off by donning a mask of “I don’t care.” As you grew older, you refused to say how you felt, refused to share emotion with me at all, and I longed for those days of preternatural flight, for one small smile from childhood.
Now you are grown and away. For years I remembered that night, and light dimmed inside me. Not long ago, your sister, missing you, recalled it, and something else, too. Your father and you playing chess. Later, quietly, as he brought you back into the fold, filling the gash I made, mending the seams, bit by bit returning you to whole.
I’m sorry I yelled at you that time for knocking the picture off the wall.
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About the artists:
Jacopo Degl’innocenti is from Florence, Italy, where he studied fine arts. He moved to New York City, where he participated in the School of Visual Arts Continuing Education Program. He works as a freelance illustrator and artist.
Susan Rowe lives in Boise, Idaho, and teaches memoir at the Log Cabin Literary Center. She has a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford and a master’s degree in creative writing.
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