Shatter

My father asked me, what do you want to do with your life? I didn't have an answer. I picked up a glass off the kitchen counter and dropped it. It shattered into a million little pieces. These are neurons. I haven't felt anything since 2007 and this is no exception. I thought of the pond down the street from my father's house. I run there. I sit on the wet swamp land and cry. I don't see anyone else and I'm not sure if this is what I wanted.

I have no purpose. I reread my poetry and panic seeps into me. It's bad and it's public. My father says, keep writing. But you can't pour from an empty glass. I am in the kitchen, I am fired up like a kiln and everything in me explodes. The pond still seeps into my skin. I am still on the banks of it, pressing my fingertips into my palms until they leave little half moons, or smiles. Virginia Woolf walked into a lake and never returned. I haven't felt anything since 2007.

I am at the airport now. I am drinking three glasses of white wine at 11am, eastern standard time. Time zones are like ticking time bombs. I am leaving home and everything I have destroyed is in the trash, to be taken to a landfill and never remembered. I imagine the shards of glass covering the ground like snow. It was winter when I went insane. It was December, but it doesn't matter. My flight is in two minutes and I'm still running towards the swamp with no stones to anchor me to the bottom. I wonder if the stones in Virginia Woolf's pockets held any sentimental value.

I want my poetry to be important to someone. Maybe that's why I'm screaming into a white screen. There's no wifi on my flight and I wonder what the point of living is without it. I am the problem. I am sitting next to a little girl who thanks me whenever I open the window; I am in the window seat because I told the flight attendant any other seat gives me anxiety. The little girl is small and curls up next to me when she sleeps. I want to make the world a little more illuminated. Maybe she will read something one day and wonder why writers put anything in their pockets at all, and remember the view out the plane window and think about glasses that are full.

More than anything, I want to write. When my father asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I didn't know I'd live to see another December where I am doing what sparks my neurons. Some of them are still sitting in a landfill somewhere, snow that covers the ground. Shards that cut like stones. I hope I am happy. I hope I will open the window and recognize the glass as something whole, something not to be broken.