Because I Could not Stop for Death

This is my second life. We’re not supposed to live this long. We’re supposed to be dead by the time we’re thirty-eight. And that’s an old statistic. Sometimes I wonder if I’m still in my younger body because I missed something. I’m younger than they are now. By a long shot. Five years is a world of difference. Add another five or six on there and there you are, snorting lines with someone who’s never heard of Steely Dan. Then you turn around and your window is gone. All you have are years. 

When I was three we had a house in Trinidad, California, where our backyard was an expanse of redwood trees from our yard, way past the border of Oregon. We had stories. We had a lighthouse. We had fairies in tree ears and a darkroom in our garage. We had poppies and a Ford. When we were driving, my dad would flick his cigarette out the window and point out flower fields. At home, he often told us that he was becoming an archaeologist and that’s why we were living in Humboldt County. Then he would take a syringe and go into the bathroom. 

Dear diary,

The best part about that Ford was the floor of the front right seat. I would sit in my mothers’s lap. There was a hole in the floorboard, about the size of a large and torn receipt. I would look down between my feet, and my mother’s feet too. I would lean down, my mother’s hands on my shoulders, and look through the hole in the floor of the station wagon, the patterns of grey concrete, gravel, and tar, sliding beneath us.
Love, Michelle
Trinidad, CA

Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me – The Carriage held but just Ourselves – And Immortality.