I am trapped, so trapped in this box some call a dorm room. Things are spinning all of a sudden, my head, my heart, somehow I'm guilty and mad and ready to cry all at once.
Typical, cliche, I HATE cliche (in case you hadn't noticed) and somehow for the last seven months my life has become a stereotypical tale of angst and self-discovery. Except perhaps the self-discovery part. I mean, I know I must have learned something but I have no idea what yet. Somewhere, my nine year old self is still struggling to understand divorce, how is that nine year old girl supposed to understand all of this?
So enough already. I have options. Write "fiction," changing small details and making it end in glitter and romance and perfection. A CD, lists of old songs that I can listen to over and over again until they offer some sort of comfort whenever I'm feeling nostalgic. The mists of pain will come and go, but somehow I know that one thing will be timeless throughout all sorrows-my memory. I can't erase it or make it go away, and that is what scares me so.
Years from now I will be able to look back to today. I won't remember the details; the fact that the carpet has a burn from where Erin set the iron while making rush sweatshirts, the colors of the ripped magazines that make the words "I believe" scrawled across the wall, the purple curtains that I threw together the first day on campus. But I will remember this feeling. This lost drowning feeling that I can't do anything to stop. And though the years should part us relentlessly, I'll be here still.
Ten years ago I was nine. My father and mother sat me down on our old yellow couch. That couch used to be my great grandmothers; it was Victorian looking with light thin pink stripes diving the gold. I loved it up until that moment. I was staring at a calender, my mother's handwriting that I had noticed days and weeks before. "Judge appt." I figured it out ages ago. No one in my family was getting sued. No one was in jail. So I had spent the last weeks crying at nothing and being alone as much as possible. And then they sat me down one day in spring. Who knows, it could be nine years to this day. And when they told me I didn't cry. They were surprised, I know, at the blank expression on my face. I wanted to tell them that the tears they were looking for were out in the woods behind the cemetery, and on my pillow, and on my little brother's pajama's as we held each other and cried ourselves to sleep. But they wouldn't have understood, so I, with all my nine years of wisdom, kept my mouth shut and just inhaled.
Ten years later and I'm still keeping my mouth shut, still inhaling. And now things are different, but somehow behind my eyelids that scene remains in the spring afternoon light. And I'm still nine, still kicking my feet against upholstery. Opening my eyes to this room, this box of a spinning room, and nothing and everything has changed. And nothing will ever change, while I live and love and grow older and learn and forget.
Funny, I thought I was upset about something entirely different. Maybe nine year old Emily just felt lonely.
