listen

Article by Lydia Quattrochi, Somonauk, IL

ARTWORK BY MELE BARTON, RANCHO

Listen. You’re going to go to sleep one night and wake up in a whirlwind of yourself. You’re going to find your tongue full of words, spilling, anxious, endless, and neither your brain nor your journals will be able to hold them all. You’re going to be awed at the thought of 13 and resolve to act like a woman from now on, but it won’t last a week. Before long, you’ll be forgetting this thing called womanhood that you can’t understand anyhow. Flinging garden hoses around, digging ponds in the backyard, making paper kites, tripping down cracked Saturday sidewalks on roller skates. And on and on it goes. The song will get soft and then swell until it hurts itself. Suddenly the hidden lyrics and unseen dimensions will rush out at you — all kinds of new shapes and colors and feelings burning in the sun on sleepy country roads.

Remember the never-growing-up mints you found in the white kitchen cabinet when you were seven? The smell of the daffodils by the rotting fence the year you said goodbye? The tiny metal box of mints felt like treasure, like Pippi Longstocking, like a miracle. The new house seemed like a miracle, too, when the mints were all gone. The basement was a fairy tale dungeon, and the attic was a magic portal waiting to be opened. Remember the stolen chocolate chips? Remember the plastic jets of birthday sprinkles you ate on the swings at the park? Remember the golden-brown glass bottles of vanilla and orange extract? When they were empty, you carried them around to smell the vanilla-and-orange smells. They were special, the most beautiful bottles in the world. You carried them in the orange purse with the worn-out credit cards and the tickets you made for a show that never happened. Remember the Barbie car your mother got from some lady’s house? You rode around on it through the house until you were almost 12. You and your friend taped a lawn chair to a trash-picked skateboard and teetered down the sidewalk, invincible. You were gonna show it to the people at the fair! Remember the stuffed giraffe you whipped around on a string? Remember reading the Dr. Seuss Birthday Book and dreaming yourself half to death? Remember how you were going to make an amusement park for yourself?

Remember the whole cities you invented, squeezing all the people together in a row on paper? You once made a map of the universe on an eight-by-eleven sheet of typewriter paper with a tiny corner that said “out of the universe.”

Remember the smell of crayons and popcorn? Remember the popcorn-y smell of Mommy’s music? Mommy’s music will never be the same. Not without popcorn and size-six pink leggings on in front of the old big-screen computer. Not without the salt and the soaked pieces. Popcorn will never be the same. You don’t draw with crayons anymore. So crayons will never be the same.

It used to be there was always someone turning your bedtime storybook pages while you squirmed, interrupted, tried to look at the pictures. Huddled there in your Disney princess nightgown, the one that gets shorter and shorter on you. But now you put yourself to sleep alone and you read your own storybooks and somehow they aren’t the same now that it’s only your voice in your head, not hers. And the stuffed animals are just hunks of cloth, not picnic companions. It’s hard to believe everything was once so vivid. Everything used to talk to you. Now it’s different. You talk to everything, the night sky, the test pattern waves in the air, the radiator churning. Your heart talks and still it beats at the doors of you and can’t be killed. You were afraid of people coming inside at night, but now you know there isn’t anyone. No monsters, no demons.

It used to be there was always someone in the rooms next to yours, but now they’re empty and dark. Their stuff is gone with them to their new homes far away. It used to be there were three baby boxes in the basement, it used to be there were three children in the gold frames climbing the stairs. But now in the house there are the footsteps of one, a confused and lonely set of wandering echoes, a bouquet of echoes.

It used to be there was only God in the sky over the apple tree that grew sour apples. It used to be there was only way to believe. Now and now. Everything gets hurt and confused like crayons of hell breaking and scribbling in your eyes.

Days go by, turn to weeks, to months. Life will hurt you like those cold medicine pills you’ve never been able to swallow. Life will compress, spin faster, spin on the head of a pin. When you go back to your old ideas, you find them like someone who didn’t invent them. Old questions get tucked away in the back of your mind. Life is a seamstress tucking hems, trimming, scissoring, transforming, endlessly stitching. Sunsets don’t seem as bright. You forget the smell of your brother’s rusted bicycle collection on summer nights. You don’t contemplate microscopic families living inside acorn shells or leaves floating down the river. Clocks and vases and pink porcelain flowers you couldn’t touch, books you couldn’t read that always scared you as a child for some reason, these things aren’t mysterious any longer. The faces in the China hutch drawers disappear and your reflection isn’t all shoved down in the bottom of windows. Stars sort themselves out and the pages of your favorite books look old and shabby. It used to be that it would take a million glorious miles to get to the bottom of those pages, those light-filled stages. Scary movies will never be the same now that you can reach the light switch, now that you know about special effects, now that you’re not scared of the dark. You don’t breathlessly watch the feather-gray sky for traces of heart-shaped snow fields flying in early December. Christmas trees just come and go these days and toys don’t fascinate you. Scampering and spying and pretending and giggling aren’t cute anymore.

ARTWORK BY AVERY-GRACE PAYNE, HOUSTON, TX