Forty-one
When I was a little girl I broke my friend Amy Wood’s Barbie while we played on the floor in her upstairs bedroom and instead of telling her that the left leg just fell off when I didn’t mean for the left leg to fall off I waited until she wasn’t looking and threw the body under the bed and picked a new doll
I guess I thought she’d find it eventually or figure out it was me but she never said a word and either she found it and figured it’d broken on it’s own or she found it and figured she’d broken it herself or she just had so many Barbies it didn’t matter or she didn’t care
Or maybe she cried for hours about her broken Barbie and maybe that specific one was her favorite one of all the Barbies and she never loved another Barbie like she loved that one but because I wasn’t that good of a friend she never let me into her grief or told me of her loss
I didn’t very often to go to Amy’s house and didn’t very often play with her again although her brother once chased me down the alley that ran between our homes calling me a wannabe boy and he didn’t know that I’d spent hours crying that I was never going to be as strong as he was always going to be
On the forty-first day since business as usual I wonder how many times I can drag my broken body out from under the bed to see the light and I wonder if anyone will notice if I’m missing or if I’m gone completely or if there are just so many of us out there that it doesn’t matter and nobody cares
I wonder at the grief of realizing the loss we are jointly experiencing and yet individually living and I wonder if there will come a point where we let ourselves out of the corner and dust off the cobwebs and re-attach our limbs and learn to love a little braver and a whole lot stronger in a whole new world
Anxiety is a bitch
she tells me like I am new to being human
like I am only recently alive
I don’t know
I say
because I am
