Adverbs
My fingers feel frenetic. Something is pouring through the tips. I’d say every page has been kissed, by them. But they’re not always kind.
“IF your life is crushing you, make it into a novel,” he said. So I bled. And I bled. Again and again. Taking his word for the truth. Writing mine… all the way through.
It’s the only thing to do. I refuse to cry over the past. I only cry over beautiful things. I keep taking notes, sketching characters with words. Adjectives. How they move into adverbs. What was it that you do, or did, to me. Was it wrong, or was it you that took advantage of a fucked up kid? Perhaps, I was just a good kid that you fucked up? Nah, always default to accountability.
I smile thinking all I made out of ME despite what you did, or didn’t do. My head is high. I smiled when I said goodbye. My light was not a lie. I wish you peace. It really was a GOOD bye.
My God did not forsake me. He clothed and swaddled me. Potty-trained me and walked me home. He was the big puffy coat that cloaked me on the long winter walks home. I was so small and pale. Wore my dark locks like a veil. I never felt alone even though she was gone – locked away while she frantically wept for a man she could never hold forever. She demanded guarantees in December. He’s just like the weather. She had an impossible dream. I walked home alone. I reveled in simple things. Like books and words. I was not her. I was relieved. Distance was my throne. It was better that way.
God loved me completely and unconditionally, always. I didn’t know God’s name. But I knew God just the same. From those years when I had no name.
And yet YOU, I never knew you. Just the things you did and still do. So, I plot them on paper, trying to avoid the anger. I don’t want that poison. Anything outside of my home, the family I created, is stranger danger. I stay away. Safer that way. And play with words. I carefully open. Confine them to paper. No more hurt. Enough.
But words are just as dangerous. Slaves were forbidden from learning to read and write for a reason. They are dangerous, they are power. Freedom. They are everything.
But you? how shall I name you? What is your adverb. How do you do? What did you do? Do you remember? Did you do it well? Is it for me to tell?
These are the questions I’m sketching, slowly. Some leave me so cold, I shut the window and bundle up and call it a day.
I’m slow and watching life with anxiety. I look still, but my frenetic fingers are on a pulse…of something. Memories framed, flashing parts of our past. Not all good. Not all bad. Inherently sad. You didn’t come back. It’s all coming back too fast. So, I try to sketch and sculpt, as fast as they come. I try to strengthen the parts of me that are dying from illness, atrophied. Focus on willing my toes to move. I enhance my spirit to compensate. And I try to rewrite my ending with you. .
It’s how I make sense of everything I knew. I let you draw me. I let you see through. Naked. Eve. No shame, before you placed blame on me…for eternity. But now, I get to name you. There’s a power in that. I pick the adverbs. I define your character. Judge what you do. But what about what I do? You may take my actions and depict what my choices drew. I pray I made you feel loved and like you were somebody. Everybody is somebody worth drawing with gracious adverbs. I can testify to great charity and mercy in my life.
Norman Mailer. What was it that he said? Ah Norman Mailer, “Every moment of one’s existence is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.”
Oh, how I die to tell your story. I retreat, to remember and sculpt and write. For hours. Guess in living, in writing, I’m dying. Taking up precious time. Every word cuts and bleeds onto paper. To make peace with our reality. The gravity. Pounding. Pain. Resounding. In a way, I thought I was being productive, by resigning it to live only in paper. But with every plot I write, I realize, it’s the same as dying for you. Over and over. But then I laugh, hiccup a little.
We always knew I’d die for you.
And so I get, the last word…I choose the adverb.
But what confuses me, how do you die for someone you really never knew?
