Monday, May 2, 2016

Freewrite

Once I had the face of a worried bird, alone in a cave of a dorm room for months. The snow blew thick against the windows and the dim string of Christmas lights never faltered and the desk scissors grew dull from cutting hair.

Once I lived in a goldfish bowl of golden-hour light, and every movement was ease. For a day, for an afternoon. I said it was so beautiful here, I would always be coming back.

Once I was a drunk, sad and collected in the daylight, using other people's eyeliner on trains and airplanes, cooking other people's eggs, angering other people's neighbors, photographed in a fractured mirror, promenading down a long tree-lined stretch of marble.

Once I was a woman standing in a fountain in a lightning storm. Eating ice cream.

Once I saw the face of a barn owl in a dream, wheeling in broad daylight across I-280 on the peninsula, in those few miles high above the reservoir where there are no buildings to be seen, a flash once, and twice, and I called for you to look, and our car went on barreling north as we gazed backwards.