StoryBooks

Did it all start this way? Why some call things constant, others impermanent. Constant as the…which star? To not change can be taken in so many different ways. I tell myself.
Does it all start this way? Grudges, I can hold one in my hand for so long it becomes stone and I leave it somewhere in water to fester, and mold, to grow roots.
I wonder.
If like in a photo of the southern man, he drives off in a red pick up, blood in his teeth, silver and gold keys belling against the ignition. I know that sound, when his knee would hit the bottoms while he adjusted himself for the long ride back to the city.
If I like, I can do it all.
If I like, I can wonder if all the parts that never happened, the parts that stay on the tip of my fingers crying to be said, but can’t. Because, not yet. They aren’t there yet, for as much as I want them, they have not arrived to my grabbing, impatient little hands. I have stopped biting my fingernails for the thousandth time. I keep them a pale pink these days, the color is called “pinking of you”. I sneak off every week and spend $17 including tip to get them manicured, because if I pay for them sometimes that stops me from ruining them, sometimes. I sneak because the money should really be nestled away somewhere easily ignored for a “rainy day” or next months rent. But, really? What is seventeen to a thousand?

“Hey dad, can I have Twenty dollars?”
“Twenty dollahs! I just gave you Twenty dollahs last week! I swear you kids think I made uh money.”

I need to get my nails done. Babies with pierced ears, I take trips this way, one on my hip one in the sink and one hanging off a tree. I hide in the bathroom to cry because it scares him when I do in front of him. I miss my old house, my shell, and my bell down the hall to hold and take away.
It is likely I do it all. Out of boredom I write perfection, mine, and I live there letting the volume get very very loud around my ears, looking at photographs, and taking notes, holding my small hands around my face, feel blessed, feel blessed, I feel, I feel, sometimes, I try and feel blessed, I have only one mother but she is a mother eight times, and with all that practice she has become very good. Though I was only her second try, I am supposed to be the lucky one.
If likely, I feel it all. Before he left, I felt what it meant to not have one. Brother and sister who were left to cry to me about confusion, forgetting, and losing basics. Never beaten or mistaken for another’s, I felt what it meant to be stripped of everything in front of a lamp, blamed and blamed and blamed, and he was always blamed. To see men cry even as boys was at first unnerving, while now I am proud, I pat them on the back and am happy for their abilities.
I am forgetting now in the wall, where I put that one bit, which rocks held the important ones. I know it cant all start this way, that even if I choose this, I know there is something else out there I just have not seen. Its there.