Still Obeying
I followed a nameless ache back to a kindergarten floor — the poem, and how it got made.
This poem started as a feeling I couldn’t name. It was a weird kind of dread I’ve carried so long it stopped feeling like a visitor and started feeling like furniture. I followed it backward and ended up on a bloody kindergarten floor I hadn’t thought about in years.
Here’s the poem. (If you want the story of how it got built ~ and the endings I threw away before I found the true one ~ that’s waiting for you at the bottom.)
I have never been brave enough to step out of the road. The headlights come barreling toward me and I freeze as If were a green bean in October; I open my arms like a street preacher, and wait for the car to hit me. I have watched comets come toward the earth, watched the sky change, and never once bothered to look for a rocket to leave on. The first time I froze in the face of Armageddon was in kindergarten and it all began so innocently enough. Sister Andrena asked me to pick up the pile of construction paper that had spilled all over the floor. As I started, I cut my finger on a piece a long red line ~ and the blood went everywhere. Which included the blue striped shirt my mother bought for picture day, the one she reminded me cost more than anything she had bought for herself in recent memory. Sister Andrena said I could not have a bandaid until I picked up every ruined page. So I knelt back down in the small forming puddle of my own blood and did what I was told. Still crying. Still bleeding. Still obeying. Still obeying. Still obeying. After the blood began to incread its exodus from my body, I lifted one red page onto my desk and held my finger up like an Olympic torch and screamed I’m going to die ~ and she said: “No. But someday you will, and on that day you’d better hope you’re braver than you are today. What a thing to to tell a bleeding little kid. But she wasn’t wrong. I was not brave then. Just like I am not brave now. Funny. I can’t remember what I had for dinner last week. I can’t recall most of my childhood. But I carry this particular memory like a photo in my wallet….the first time someone told me I was going to die, and that I would even do that badly. Fifty years later I am still on that floor, still watching the next comet come ~ frozen, certain, correct, obeying the dark thing inside me that values manners over moving out of the way of oncoming traffic. No, I’m not brave. But… I am not afraid of the cut. I am not even afraid of the blood. I am afraid that there is a piece inside of me of me has been waiting in the road on purpose for the headlights. I sit here and wait for the doom. Expecting it, honestly. So I sit. And when I get hit I bleed. And when I bleed I ask for help. And almost every time, someone “helpful” answers me with: “You just need to be braver.” Thanks. I’ll try. After all, I’ve always been pretty good at obeying.
I almost didn’t share this one.
Below ~ for paid subscribers ~ is the whole excavation: where this started, why a kindergarten memory survived when I can’t remember most of my childhood, and the three different endings I wrote and discarded before I found the one that was actually true. I found the real last line this morning, in daylight, and it surprised me.
If you’ve ever had a part of you still kneeling on some old floor ~ I think the story behind this one is for you.
I want to tell you how this poem got made, because honestly, it didn’t start as a poem and maybe it isn’t one at all. This piece started as a feeling I couldn’t get my little penguin arms around.
I never breakdown my writing process like this…but let’s give it a try:
