Someone once told me that every time a memory is remembered, bits and pieces of the event or the image in your mind begins to fade so that eventually, the memory itself will be nothing more than a blur.

"...she walked by herself to search for her home. She walked by herself 'til one day a boy caught up to her side. He held out his hand but she shook her head and just smiled, she smiled, she smiled, and, and she said that's very nice, but no thank you I'm doing fine, all alone here doing fine, on my own here. And he looked into her eyes for that lonely part but no, she wasn't lonely, just alone, and as she turned and walked away he wondered maybe I can change that way."

"Just because you feel it, doesn't mean it's there."

Story of my life.

When I was six years old, my mom packed a suitcase for me, the smallest one she could find and the most worn down, filled it with an assortment of sweaters and socks, and took me to the train station in a nearby town, in Colby, Wisconsin. I was born in Colby three days before Christmas in the winter of 1983 in a shack of a home along the side of a wealthy landowners farm. Because my father worked year round, the self-proclaimed philanthropist let our family live there during my mom's pregnancy, but once I was out, so were we. The new year brought more willing men to Colby, younger men, men with lower standards and even lower income requirements. My father didn't last long. Three weeks later, my father shot himself in the head with a .36 caliber revolver on his way home from the market. They found his body in a ditch below the concrete road only two miles from the farm, blood seeping into the bushel of parsley and grain as the snow fell forgivingly over him like a blanket. My mom moved into her great-aunt's house and raised me as best as she could, until one day her exhaustion and her loneliness caught up with her, and the only thing she could do was pack up and leave. Only I was the one who would be leaving.


...I got the idea of this story from a movie, which was based on a book, Wisconsin Death Trip. In the movie, there's this one segment that describes a woman who places her son on a train with a sign around his neck. The woman shortly thereafter disappears and the boy, unaccompanied, travels to wherever the train was going in hopes of finding someone who will claim him. Nobody does. He waits at the train station to no avail and ultimately dies of hunger in the snow. I thought this story was so beautiful in its simplicity. A child left alone to fend for himself when his mother could find no better solution to her own troubles.

Everyone keeps saying how hot it is today. Maybe the hottest day of the summer even. I'm sitting in my cage of an office, enclosed by shatter proof glass and the hum of the air conditioner, wrapped in a winter sweater and wearing knee high socks. It is cold.

He left his scarf curled up in a ball on the chair in the corner of my room. The smell of the American Spirits he was smoking the night before clung to the delicate fibers of the worn wool and I squeezed the scarf against my lips, breathing him in for the last time.

I wish there was a zipper down the notches in my spine so I could unzip myself from the wretchedness within... I hate my insides. I am the diving bell. The air around me presses down with calloused hands against my forehead and squeezes the bridge of my nose. Either a sickness is upon me, mischievously invisible, biding it's time, or the life I've been living has finally caught up with me. I am in a constant state of exhaustion, yet my spirit hollers in excitement and the night attracts my mind.