Tonight's writing

You can call it neurosis, a self-guided training program designed to have me expect the worst. It traces back to the muddy memories of my early childhood, those swollen streams.

Before I learned to walk, I crawled. This was before California, in the house at 11 Merrywood Lane, a split-level in the woods three thousand miles east. I learned the blue shag rug by heart and by touch, with palm and knee. Rooster and Nails were legs and feet, too tall to grasp. I had only one brother then, Adam who called me by my babyhood nickname, Igles, until Rooster snapped at him to stop, that’s not her name.

One night there was a fire. My mother came downstairs to take me out of my bed, to pick me up and rescue me, to take me outside into the cold Connecticut air and let the smoke dissipate from my nostrils. As she wrapped her arms around my little-girl body, I heard her say: “I wish you’d died.”

You can call it deception, a brand of self-burning of the brain. Call it habit. Consider it a running conversation I’ve created between myself and the world. Except only one of us knows it exists.