Where I began

That was always me, a need to write. Words on paper. What poured from my fingertips through my pen. No one to see . No one to hear. No one’s disturbing face to get in the way and make me feel uneasy. Thoughts that were safe to mix with feelings in a kind of dough that if I tried to say them would only stick in my throat.

My world was limited. No space for more than me in my two boxes.

One box was my room. On my bed. Teepee legs folded, collecting thoughts. There I maintained my seventeen-year-old solidarity, a window covered over in a tattered pull-down shade that hovered like a droopy eyelid. Chair-sized Frog crouched in his corner, cross-eyed, so very green. My back against foam pillows, I scribbled love songs in shorthand code. All the words to “Up, up and away my beautiful balloon” and Paul Simon’s, “I am a rock. He was an island, same as me with my books and poetry. Metaphors, my old friends, shared my pen, turned knife, brush, clay that cut, coloured, and comforted as a sun-speckled blanket over me.

Outside, people fluttered around like birds, alighting, pecking, flitting off again, were not expected to stay.

From my Up the Downside, a Memoir.