I am not an adult.

As I paint my nails, as I pay my bills, as I pet cats, play with bits of twig, hum “The Calendar Prince” in the shower.

I run away from so much, not realizing it’s a trail of blood and stones. No birds will come and let me slip away into the woods.

Isn’t that how witches are made? The little ones who wander and like it? Whose sense of self grows to the clearing, the canopy of leaves, the sky; they don’t want to eat the children, but they won’t go away. Find your own forest to get lost in.

“I’m no good at any of this,” I say to my water bottle, “why do they trust me with more than words?”

The river, silt and sand, laps at the brush, broken shells, beer bottles. Waves are slapping at gulls, barges in the channel are sounding, a train on the bridge follows. Discordant thrum, Mississippi farts, I heard someone call them. The sun is setting and rain is coming, but I’m as far as I can get from the folding chairs, sorting pebbles and reeking of filthy water.

Erika, get in the boat.

I don’t want to get in the damn boat; don’t you get it? If you leave me here, this becomes something new. The world forces itself on me with a slap and a crash, and my thoughts spread out wide wide, as wide as they can go, barely disturbed by lighthouses and buoys, so self-absorbed in my wanderings that I fold in on myself, invisible to the ugly men who follow me from school, invisible to anyone who wants something of me. Just give me five more minutes, please, let me codify this experience, let me wrap words around the glowing shell-gray of the sky, pinhead toe prints in the sand, drying curls whipped into a halo. This is what I’m here for, to keep these memories, to find you later with them polished and lovely, to give you the gift of my heart.

Grumbling, I clean my office.

Spiral. Deer. Porcelain. Tree.

There are books and books in the quiet heart, my hands are inching along spines, gracefully grasping the way a thousand hands have. Here here, where has my city gone?

I haven’t been writing because I’ve been writing, or or…it’s hard to see this as anything more than mental detritus, the fluff that comes when I crack open and can’t handle dialogue, action, meaning, but.

It also makes it the most truthful. These are the words in my head, seared on the inside of my skull with electric hues, careening with a maddening momentum, easily forgiven in their enthusiasm.

Perhaps someday, I’ll learn how to say to people: This sentence is a painting, is a wonder, is a dream, began as a misty vision and was refined through my iron teeth, my raspy tongue, was shaped around a breath, a pause, a place for you to rest inside everything I say. The shape of this sentence is art; convert the frequencies to colours and it will be the sunset from your first date, the stars you saw when everyone was asleep, that thought I watched you half-whisper and forget. This part of me is yours, the meaning is yours, the shape my heart takes in your hands is yours, and only yours. I love you with words.

When I think of you, I smell roses: a dozen, disposable deaths to your vanity. I smell the thousand lies of your legacy, taste the exclusive laughter, wonder why your sandbar curves so wide through the river of me. I have been an exemplary citizen with your old life, entrusted with your loved ones. There has been no salting of the fields, no burning of bridges. Hands have not been slapped away even as I’m turned inside-out, gagging your gifts into the alley. What wonderings others might entertain when so abandoned, I carry none. The roads of you are familiar, bricked with conversations I’ve deleted, mortared with oracular expectorations. The fluffs of you that float by these days are a parade of comparison, not that a new lover might be found wanting on your scale, but that I’m not just dashing down the way of Not You, whichever You might be. As I’m fond of repeating these days, I’m too old for that shit.

I wish to be done marking miles with lays, tracing scratch-red spines as if checking tasks, steeling my resolve against love with lust. While fun, let’s be frank, there’s too much burying memories with a welt-stained dalliance and I’d like to be done with digging graves. Blood on the thigh, sun on the snow, the new year’s come.

I have lost my patience. What was once an endless hunt is a swift slaying, made so by my lengthening legs, the fire in my gut, the path found by moonlight. Was I lost in my lack of game, content to search for doors in the woods, restless only after the discovery of prey? One after another, down and down and down down down, their little hearts go, their little arrows sticking in my throat. I am a human animal, after all, leaping through gullies in my new skin, bright and lithe as starshine, sharpening my claws on sweet words and minced meanings. Bleeding and gasping, limping and learning, what was once a place I never touched I roll in freely, breaking skin on barbs, finding traps in their hands.

‘You could be a child for all you run,’ comes the thought, comes the voice, a kinder voice, a wiser voice. It wants me to temper my traipsing, use reason as I stalk, find a challenge among the trees. My want will have none of it. Bristling under the leash, steam oozing from its teeth, it’s all I can do to cry, “Whoa, whoa,” and spiral it up the slopes. I can’t change quickly enough for me, spinning through ways and means like the last round of Russian roulette. The pain should teach where my feet shouldn’t go, no?

No.

Down comes the hammer: sleep. Down comes the weather: dreams. I come to muzzily, sheets kicked to the kitty corner, comforter rotated ninety degrees. The nightmares are heavy things, filled with dying statues, nail-less hands, screams turned into whispers that I can’t hear through the static of living.

The static of living. That’s how I think of the waking world. It’s a mass of tiny tasks perpetually sliding into an entropic mess. The only things I hang onto are the ones I made, and those are few and far between. Quite often I find myself crouched in the shower, watching my skin raise and redden in the heat that gives me permission to think, musing hard on the hours spent texting, talks over coffee I don’t drink, museums and hand-holding, enthusiasm and loneliness bubbling out of me in equal concentrations. I want demands, I want someone to grab my heart and squeeze, I want to have all of my attention required. Let us lead the merry chase and even if I end up lost, it will be something *new.*

I chide myself constantly for thinking no one right now can offer me a challenge, but my flag stands on the hill, my boots on their fingertips. Call me away from the spiral of myself, please, I am afraid of falling again.

Grit your teeth, you steel-gripped bitch. Did the wild smile drown in fall? Did the endless confidence fade with the daylight? Who are you to fake it again? Who are you to let everyone down by shoving them out? At the bottom, eyeballs burning, back of the neck throbbing with your heartbeat, you find the iron tower of yourself, the precipice of do or die, and goddamn them everyone, you do. There is survival and steam, rust and a moonstone soul, cratered and beaten and and… waiting. You have wings, the kiss of Father Time, and all the new mistakes to make. Bring back a full parchment; bring us the legend of yourself.