5/9/17
7:57pm
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I sit near a gift of yellow tulips.
*
The clouds had a pink hue just near their edges in the oncoming sunset. Similar to the color of the walls of my childhood room. I remember the swing set and the tree, whose branches I would sit in. I remember that kind of magic. It still exists in-between the blades of grass of The Backyard. A faint type of mist buzzing upwards. I’d like to say I can only feel the mist, rather than see it. But I feel that I can see it, as I sit with the memory of just earlier today. The memory of all times of The Backyard. Pixelating in and out of the frames my mind seems to be holding onto, for one reason or another. I step into my spirit when I step into The Backyard.
*
My gut pulled me here again out of all of the other options. Something wants to show me a piece that’s been left out. A frame not properly translated through the files of my being that hold The Backyard. A few missing pixels amidst the mist. …Something there and something beyond – for there was always something behind the garage to discover, beyond The Backyard. A wilderness. A dog with blue eyes. One winter’s worth of sledding under the branches of a whole new world. And then why did we never sled again? Something built and torn down again. Pets buried, and then dug up and eaten by other animals in the night. A constant curiosity to peer behind the literal cobwebs and spiders, thorns, and potentially poisonous plants. The broken glass I don’t ever remember seeing; but why else is there a feeling my feet will get cut beyond The Backyard?
*
“Don’t go back there.” Did my mother tell me that? Did she mean forever? Was it just for the moment, before she herself knew what dangers were or weren’t there awaiting her children? An instruction stretched through time, that feels like both love and death.
*
“Don’t go back there.” Oh, but I want to… Like I always wanted to wander in the night, far and away. But the sense of being lost, forever disconnected from what I thought defined me; a warm love I didn’t fully understand, brought me back from the edge of fully letting go. And so it is still the tie – the thorns of the unknown I was told not to see.
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After-thought: How can we ever write freely when there is potential to hurt those close to us who might not understand our words?