These Shoes

These shoes I am in
Show the places I’ve been
In nothing but black and white.
I remember a time
Filled with roadsigns and winds
And the mountains near out of sight. 

I wore them by chance
I could teach, play and dance
And sing their favorite songs.
I wore them to see
Many towns and cities
Where the drives were oh so long.

I wore them on planes
On cars, buses and trains
To return back to my home.
I shook and I cried
When they were washed and dried
With the rips all stitched and sewn.

Back in the past
The day went by too fast
And we drove into the night.
I climbed up the rubble
Knowing I was in trouble
Without a hint of spite.  

I was in love
While the moon shone above
And he said he loved me too.
The sparks how they burned
And the music it turned
I knew it would end too soon. 

These shoes I am in
Are pure black with white trim
They’ve kept me on track.
I’ve walked away
As I wished I could stay
I guess there’s no going back. 

Classification: Never-Quite-a-Child

My friend, welcome back.

What an unexpected, nearly expected surprise. I am glad that you have made the decision to inhale new memories with me and to fall, despite the fact we will end up a splatter of melted crayons on a canvas of cracked white earth.  How else did you think we were going to leave our mark on the world?  

Many years before we met, or at least before we are meeting anew now, I was a Never-Quite-a-Child. A rare breed, these children were.  Back then, you see.  They were a kind that was to be looked passed and frowned upon; a kind that was a crime against nature.  If we are being honest here (which I hope we always will be.  Lies are the dull wrappers on crayons, trapping the alluring spectrum of colors that can be seen underneath), the breed has grown into a sizable amount of drunkards brats, teenager's bastards and world-riddled orphans.  Since we are not to the point of common knowledge, the sharing of our souls, I will skip which I am for now.  That is a topic for later; the after dinner conversations.

These children (or shall I say we) are Wanderers, Losers, Needers, Keepers.  We are Wanters, Givers, and Unconditional Lovers. We are the ones forced to grow up out of our pink ballerina tutus and our worn down Spiderman shirts and dive right into our mother's tight, too-high heels and our father's long brown khaki pants with a briefcase bruising our thighs.  Results of circumstance that never got the chance to stay down for more than a moment on the ground of children, piled over one another to get the pink, the blue.  The red.

Do not misunderstand me.  I wanted to be a child as much as the one on the playground is.  When it comes down to the nitty-gritty, the going or coming, the ebbing and flowing, we as children don't seem to recognize difference.  A black crayon is black, a white is white.  Brown, brown.  The colors are an assortment all pointed towards your own design.  Your own demise.

The patrons, the benefactors of a Heavenly Hell must have seen a darkness in my bones.  The marrow the deepest set of charcoal colored wax with the word 'Crayola' scrawled across a brown wapping.  As a Never-Quite-a-Child, I was set among a life where forced growing pains and loud night fights were burned into the brain of my three year old self.  Survival of the fittest.  Stay small and squander or stretch like a weed and master desolation.

Crayons weren't a part of my beginnings.  They were instruments of creation I underwent as children my age, older, younger, chose colors and assigned them a place on a blank space of remade tree.  I made a game of crayons, where each person was a singular color.  My father was blue.  Calm, caring. Wise.  My mother was red.  Passionate, original.  Loving.  Two primary colors that usually mix quite well, but in my own life as a Never-Quite-a-Child, it turned out otherwise.

People have constantly changing colors.  At one point, my mother was the entire rainbow.  I won't psychoanalyze that one for you, I am sure you can make your own assumptions.  Some remain the same.  For as long as I've known a girl, she's been olive green.  For as long as I've known a boy, he has been both light and dark purple.  Romantic, nostalgic, gloom and frustration.  What changes most is us.

Being a Never-Quite-a-Child, no matter the changes of Crayola colors, I still see her as beautiful. Him, shattered pieces held together by a mask.  We are all the colors we have ever been.  And despite the fact that I grew up too fast, that I filled in the space where others should have nourished, I plunged into the use of Crayons and defined myself as a color.  What, my dear friend, is yours?

  
         

Cyclone

You must have forgotten me.

I don't blame you, of course.  I know the days get busily blurry like half-remembered dreams and the nights grow dark, causing even the strongest souls to shiver.  Trust me, I know that in the deep recesses of your unawakened subconsciousness, you may have an image of who you think I am.  It is the itch you can't scratch, the name you can't fit to a face even though our lives have crisscrossed like the x's in Tic Tac Toe.  You might deny it, claim to know exactly who I am, though secretly searching through the file of people in your mind trying to fit my face.  If you remembered me, though, you wouldn't be here.  You'd remember the name Simran Stone and that the name belongs to me.

Oh me.  Oh my.  My old friend.  I think you may have deliberately ripped me from your being.  You know I bring along with me something some find too painful to remember and some, too sweet to forget.  Which, pray tell, do you fit in with?  Actually, let me answer that for you.  You chose to forget.  Is it because I am quick to make the wrong decisions and slow to make the right?  Or is because my face reminds you of a place, barren and smoggy, that is far from here and filled with the pain of a thousand goodbyes?  I thought that you liked me because I was complicated, but meeting you again reminds me that no one likes complications.

Despite all this, it is good to see you again.  It feels like sixteen lives have been lived in a total of three years, showing that time makes us utterly different people.  You've changed a great deal, old pal, but then again so have I.  I am no longer the girl that chases dreams like they were butterflies entangled in a webbed net.  I am no longer the small child that cried only to have a taste of salty water since the ocean was thousands of miles away.  I am new, but I haven't forgotten who I was.

When you met me, I remembered quite a few things.  I remembered that you were looking for something, or someone.  You may have been searching for a lightness in the deepest of the blackness, because everyone is searching for something yellow, aren't they?  I remember how you told me, as they pulled you away, that you would remember me.  You would remember me always.  Only later, just a few weeks after you returned home to your warm bed that enveloped you and made you dream, did you find out the meaning of my name.

This is the part where you wait for the answer.  You think I will give it to you; the finger on the trigger, the number on the ticket.  Simran.  It means....

No such luck.  You are a functioning human being, or at least you were when we last met.  You have bones in your fingers that bend and groan.  You have joints that ache and muscles that spasm.  You have a heart in your chest that beats like a drum, causing your ribcage to do a dance every other second.  You're fully capable.

It's a choice, my old friend.  To see my face.  To remember, even if part of you doesn't want to, exactly who I am.  What I was to you.  There is such a triumphant roar in your mind when you'll place me in a memory that fits, just like a key in a lock.  Click.  There it is.  You've got it.  

But where does that leave me now?  I gave up on the dreams of a child.  I am older now but instead of being ready for the world to come and kick me down like I was when I was oh-so young, I am ready to fall face first into the center of the universe.  To fall into the blackness that humans like you and I always seem to fight.  I guess it doesn't hurt me so much anymore.  To remember, that is.  The past is a shade of sorrow and the future is a tone that hasn't begun.

But here I am.  Simran.  You can call me Simi, of course, because it makes no difference to a soul that has begun the deep and dark plunge into the world of unknown consequences and the clutching of lungs that rip away your breath.  When you chose to forget, I chose to remember.  And here again, we meet, and a new trail of memories follows closely behind us.  Are you ready to remember me as I am now?  You've forgotten who I was then.  I am unsure you will like the new me; the me that enjoys the fall but loathes the crash.

Are you ready to fall with me, trailing memories down the cyclone of remembered rememberings?

Good, because here we go.    

That bad to fail, that hard to fall.