roads

 I stay up all night falling into rabbit holes online. The author who wrote Tiger, Tiger dead at thirty eight. Fiona Apple’s interviews about who is stronger - is it the rapist or the little girl who survives? The playlist I’ve curated since I was fifteen full of child abuse, sadness, violence, self-harm, bulimia. I consume all the sadness and darkness I can find to keep my own sadness and darkness company but really all it does is multiply it. But I’m fifteen and I don’t understand this and even if I did it wouldn’t make a difference. Ten years later I understand that there are very few ways to let the pain. There are very few ways for kids to communicate that they have been separated from the other kids by a violation, and that the violation has created a canyon or maybe built a thick steel wall around them to keep them isolated and alone. I communicate it with music, films, books, interviews that make isolation seem romantic and bearable. My first kiss was with a fifty year old man but I don’t really mind because I was born different and dark and this will mean that I have a wild and colourful and adventure-filled life while my friends get pregnant and married and buy houses and tend to their gardens. Until my wild and colourful adult life starts I will cut myself in the dark and lie on the threadbare carpet and cry until I’m dehydrated. I tell myself it will build character. I'm barely fifteen.

And then suddenly, all the road blocks life places in my way end. The road opens up, paved and smooth, slippery with maple syrup sweetness. The sun shines brightly, my eyes are unaccustomed and I find shade where I can, in the wild forest pines of the past on either side of the journey. To slip under one, into the shade, feels like relief sometimes. Feels like a warm coat on a cold day, or a cold shower in a heatwave. But I don't stay beneath the pines for long. I get back on the brightly lit road, so light that I feel exposed and seen. That's where I am now. The paving stretches onwards into the horizon, further than the eye can see and I know that if I don't take any sideways detours I can stay on it. I can reach the rainbow. Perhaps the pot of gold at the end is in fact little gold coins scattered along the way. I pick them up and stuff them into pockets, feeling them, not taking them out to examine so I don't get too comfortable with the new life. Where things are handed to me, easy to find, shining. Incase I run out of road or the gold stops, I hide them about my person. I hoard it all.

I'm still learning this brand new road, y'know? I don't beat myself up for not deleting the playlist or for distrusting the road. I just stay on it. Take a couple pictures along the way. Learn to sun bathe. Sit a while.