Every day, exponentially expanding, are my thoughts. I then forget them. I have a room and all I see are things I’ve collected over the past two years. Yarn and knitting needles and more colored pencils and more yarn and…and the rest is mine, my things. My things fit into a box. My small purse and my three backpacks. My two photos of myself and my son. My flute. My ancient tv, on which I watch Friends and Sex and the City. My old bathrobe.
My photos are in my old house, where my son still lives. We were sitting on the sofa, the sofa I chose with my husband. As far as I know, my ex husband, my son, and the new wife still sit on my furniture.
My things represent my life because they are my life. My life is in this room, with my blackout curtains blocking out the back of a giant satellite dish that overlooks the pool five stories below. And across the way there is another giant building with the exact same apartments housed within. Each has a minuscule balcony that nobody uses unless someone is smoking. Sometimes I smell cigarette smoke from the twenty-somethings who live next door. On Saturday nights they play rap. I have never met them.
What’s familiar to me are my knitting needles and my yarn. I know people I see on my decrepit television. I know when the tv finally dies I won’t have that. I try to focus on what I do have but less and less do I have any kind of desire to bother. But, I’m still a writer. I still have that.
I want to finish the hat I’m knitting for my son. I want to finish something. I wanted to finish my life, but I haven’t and I won’t. When I die I hope there’s something good to do. Something to finish.
I have memories, and I want to talk about them and, more than anything, I want to see them. I want to go on a drive through Hope Valley and I want to buy a sandwich at the Genoa Store and I want to drive to the Playa and I want to get in a truck and drive into the desert and I want to go find hot springs and I want to smile and I want to drive that weird road that seemed to go nowhere and had nothing particularly memorable about it except that it was old and there was a town with a Smith’s and a gas station and and old church and I want to see those things. I want to see a sunset from my own porch. I want to make toast in my own kitchen with my own dishes and I want to drink water from a glass I remember finding at a thrift store. Instead I’m just sitting in this room, with the dark curtains hiding an outside that means nothing and I’m looking at facebook and seeing familiar faces and I’m confused because I have no reason to make new memories and no way to do so. I have no relevance and nothing I see is relevant to me. I am a million miles away from anything familiar and I’m driftless in the sky.
Michelle O’Kane 