Somebody stole the little executive who’s in charge of my functioning, and now I can only exist in fleeting, unbalanced decision. A sentence here and there. 

A vision of heaven, walking through sloping lawns on long grass. A house, mostly gone. Walls gone like a dog with its legs splayed out in the sunshine, the roof, a triangle body.  A bird, black bodied, red chested, flitting here and there.  

David Brooks, a man only able to write anecdotes, and I’m fucking worse, because I’m doing the same, but more self centered. 

Mothers day brunch, and I’m sitting on a manicured patio, and my aunt tells me about her husband, who replaces all his socks every December. A tangential discussion of a time before single use diapers. Hanging the cloth and having a fit, the wind throwing your work into the ground and its mud, house too new for a grass lawn. 

Is it working? Do you understand me? 

A series of recommended articles. “The people who everyone likes are often the loneliest,” “The shocking truth about loveliness, and what this phenomenon really means,” etc. Though is there a way to properly judge one’s own loneliness, one’s own loveliness? I don’t know what about my browsing history brought this to my feet. Narcissism? I do not trust the robots and their judgement. 

I’m fifteen and learning to journal and writing in circles, hunched over the question of if I’m being honest, or if I’m writing for an audience. Unable to help imagining being famous, authorial, authoritative. 

I’m starting to get sickened on it. 

I want to interview someone. I want to talk about more than all that I am. But this is so much easier, yeah? 

I’m eighteen and I’m writing a personal essay, arguing a faux passion of history, please let me into college. A history major, because everything deserves to be acknowledged. Because everyone deserves a chance to be important, and part of history. Onfim, etc. 

God, I just want to be remembered. I will be forgotten, and I want your attention. 

And standing on a dirt road, ten years old in the sunshine, eating penny candy and nobody dead, is this the only story I can tell? 

I ride my bike down the road that separates our house from the neighbors’ land. John Root owns the woods, thin trees that in a few years time will be logged,  but right now are still standing. He lets us play. Leaf litter and huckle berries and sunshine. 

Mom tells us that before I was born, his brother, whose name I can’t remember, was dying. Cancer, probably. And our cat, Mossy, who catches bats and rides in the mail truck and is older than I am at the time, she went over to the neighbors house when it happened. Sat on his sick bed and knew it was the time for saying goodbye. 

This place and time, It’s so much in my head. Too much of what I am. 

Riding down the road, our house is on the left, painted black, with its big yard. A patch of strawberries for me, and rhubarb for my brother, right along the fenceline topped with barbed wire. There’s a swing set and a trampoline and an overturned canoe. There’s cherry trees and a picnic table. There’s a statue of Buddah in the side yard. No one can tell me anything about it, besides the fact he’s always been there. 

The land was a dump in another life. 

Going up the road is the cell tower and the abandoned elementary school. The school will be burned, around the same time as the trees coming down. I think the basketball court is still standing. I know the cell tower is. 

Going down, riding down the road, is the bakery. The owners have kids, younger than I am. I watch them climb trees and their parents give me baked goods. We stand in the kitchen, and watch the making happen. We play hot wheels on hot plastic decking. 

Riding down to the bakery, and it turns from dirt to gravel to parking lot. I lose control of my bike. Fear, going over landscaping boulders and crashing into the short trees with sharp needles. Protect your head and scrape up the knees. 

On the left one, a couple cuts a few inches long, not deep, but infected. We go to the swimming pool, and I dunk it in the water, feeling the sting. Picking out rocks and scraping off goo, pulling off a thick mat of dead skin, red and green and yellow, baptized in chlorine. 

I still have the scars. They’re what taught me my left and right. Always aware of it, on this map of my body. 

I’m ravenously jealous. I’m in a web of being endlessly fascinated by scraping my own knees. I’m partially through reading Mickey 7, the novel version of the movie, Mickey 17. 

He, Mickey, is a historian. There is no use for historians, no work and no point, when everything is recorded. There was a point when I wanted to be one, at sixteen, unable to think of anything else to be. The fascination, with story. The importance of the telling, and my own history, the only thing accessible and yet untold. 

It’s last Friday, and I’m standing in my boyfriend’s school, for a showcase, in a room full of hopeful future expertise.