I recently read an Atlantic article by Julie Beck called "Life's Stories" wherein the writer claims that "Any creation of a narrative is a bit of a lie." We all need these creative lies to make sense of the world, to find meaning, and sometimes to just make it through the day. I have been a voracious reader since childhood, and so when asked to share one story that most impacted my life, looking back at my 51 years, I am unable to pinpoint just one. When I reflect, the multitudes of narratives I've read throughout my life bubble forth much like a kaleidscope reflecting constantly changing patterns from the small bits of each story that I can remember; and there's the rub: My lack of long-term memory embarrasses me. Even with books that I've read more than once, sometimes I can't even remember the main plot! That being said, if forced to choose, I would pick Proust's In Search of Lost Time as probably having the longest-lasting impact on me overall. Besides details such as the infamous Madeleine scene and the young Marcel longing for his mother in the darkness of his room, more importantly, I remember the impact of Proust's long-winded sentences and paragraphs leading to a great reward: such beautiful language! Some insight! Now that it has been over a decade since I read Proust, I am still a lot like the person I was when I read In Search--melancholy and ruminative much like the fictional and factual Marcel. But I've come along ways in recognizing that it is getting lost in rumination that causes the most suffering: longing for what was rather than savoring the present. I still have a ways to go, but mindful meditation practice along with solid experience with life struggles, has helped me to grow and mature and to finally achieve something like happiness.

I am the same age as Marilyn Monroe when she passed away and I sometimes dream of being a First Lady of the United States. I have the same birth day and month as Halle Berry and can relate to her charactor in Gothika as if the film was created from true events from my first marriage, God Bless Douglas' soul. I was Prom Queen my senior year in highschool which had a Steven King theme. My mother was in "Misery" when I threw red rust colored paint on my prom dress she paid over $499 dollars for. She turned into a real Mommy Dearest. I am looking for some to be "In the Line of Fire," because "Gentleman Prefer Blondes." I could do without "The Seven Year Itch" and absolutely "NO WIRE HANGERS!" I want to be your "CatWoman" and purrrrrrr while we role-play "Kidnap" and "A Perfect Stranger." Are you my Prom King? Could you like a quiet telepathic girl who likes to light things on fire cause "Some Like It Hot"? Could you see yourself having "Children of the Corn" with a movie star type walking "The Green Mile" until the end of time? All auditions must bring a copy of their head shot and resume and popcorn on the salty side.

12:23 am. i plunge sunburnt fingernails into mandarin rind and peel what is left of summer until it lands, in strips of trailer wall, on the ground. swallow wedges of a fever dream sun. or warmed diet coke before it lodges, viscous, in your throat. the mandarin fizzles away in bruised stomach lining, and i am left thirsty. just enough for a snake-scaled tongue to probe the water from my gums, always scraping, scraping. rusted blood thickens with saliva and i drink, too naive to know the difference.

6:53 am. my skin wilts in the shower; desert sand washes away noiselessly in the rain, and i cannot stop watching as the dunes of my shoulders collapse. head, shoulders, knees, toes: the domino effect until i am curled on the floor, painting cracked legs with discount razors. plucking hair follicles until they blossom and swell, stars burning in my thighs. momma whispers in my ear. “you don’t want to be that girl, do you?” i scream no, but pulped mandarin catches in my throat and the shorn hairs reply. they spell out liar, liar on the mildewed tiles.

9:13 am. i am seasick on the school bus, surrounded by a gordian knot of limbs. ellie’s shampoo teases me. i want to run my fingers through her curls, inhale jasmine so i can keep it in the smallest part of me. make myself beautiful like the rest. “braid for me?” she drawls, twiddling a bow. i plait, forgetting the way momma did it, tugging until i was sure she ripped my scalp. i tuck strands gently, let the jasmine vines have just enough room to flower. she grins cheshire when i finish. “thanks! ben lee’ll love this green ribbon.”

when i come home, i rip all the grass from their roots, feeling earth and something raw inside me come loose. i try to weave a ribbon better than ellie’s. i never do.

5:43 pm. thawed shrimp and grits, the wailing of fork on plate. i drag it on the ceramic, then stop. momma quiets in the rocking-chair corner, and i scavenge in the drawers for her makeup. (i tiptoe, because ghosts scare easy with noise.) for the first time, i want to see myself in this chipped mirror. waste away on cowhide eyeshadow, strawberry sherbet blsuh, the adrenaline rush of becoming. and then i am standing there, dandelion at dusk, artemis cloaked in shadows. she is me. trembling, i press two fingers to glossed lips and kiss until the sunset splits itself in two.

7:52 pm. i talk with the pinup girls plastered on pappa’s walls, perfumed updos bobbing as they listen to my story. (pappa left a long time ago, but he’d sure come back if he knew. momma would somersault in her grave.) i ramble like a fresh colt: about how boys smell too sweet under their breath and how the girls offer themselves up like marzipan and how i wish i could like how the sugar crusts on my teeth whenever ben lee calls my name. about the fever dreams of ellie i have, yanking off her green ribbon and breathing oh so close to her minted lips. how badly i want those dreams to come true. the pinup girls nod, the whites of their eyes unblinking, and i see how their cheeks flush like mine. how their hands fumble at the garters.

i drape mothballed sweaters over their bodies.

12:23 am. it’s just me and the coyotes tonight. the night sky tastes cold, pure as the constellations tumble over themselves. the moon wanes into a caladrius, ragged feathers sprinkling moondust to the stars. i pull open the window, straining past mesh screen to look into its eyes. it turns away.

momma once told me that each person is a dead star, fallen to earth to live their life over again. i squint and imagine me, in a past life: soul soaring with a lover, sketching her face in orbit, sea salt eyes, the moonbeam nose. somewhere, a coyote cries, piercing the silence. i wonder if they, too, are yearning for a person they’ve never met.

the caladrius is luminous, the heart of a pearl just out of my reach. maybe i was meant to meet the skies after all. i am burning now, longing reforging until it chokes my sternum, obsidian. orchestra pulsates past my veins; and suddenly, the rebirth of a supernova takes center stage.

the stars tell me she glided past galaxies, phoenix-wing until she met the sun. maybe i killed her. maybe she let me.

light only shines in darkness. so i stand, satellite, plucking holes in the sky in the shape of our names.

greenwich village, december 1994. condensation fogs my glasses like momma’s kettle as i run to the corner store, snow crunching hard candy under my boots. patchwork clothes rise and fall with my heaving chest, a jigsaw puzzle sewn too tight to unravel. bennie’s overalls, erma’s scarf, papa’s tweed. ruddy-faced, i smile at the gray sky, an empress and her new clothes.

mr. lee opens the door before i knock, rubbing tomatoes faster than a shoeshiner on wage day. i am too mesmerized by the lollies to notice how he hides the stained sleeve behind his arm when another customer rings. penny pops glint like jewels; mr. lee catches me drooling and smiles when i sneak a coin from erma’s allowance. the doorbell chirps its two-note song, sending me off to the playground.

jackie is sitting on the seesaw, fiddling with the blue beanie i knitted for her. she counts to ten while i search the pockets of my overalls. (mrs. blume called jackie her star student, after all.) sheepishly, i hold out the gift. she smiles brighter than christmas lights, hugging me and licking the strawberry penny pop like lipstick. we make snow angels, staring at chimney smoke and imagining a world past the chainlink fence. before i leave, jackie presses a box in my hand: a bracelet threaded from rainbows. for you, she says. so you won’t forget this christmas!

i come home, flushed, frostbitten, and flying on top of the world.

/

greenwich village, december 2014. passerby stop outside storefronts, clutching lattes in one hand and designer bags in the other. the graffiti has been painted over; blank walls subdue the colors writhing like snakes. polished windows and picket fences gleam pretty in the snow. (even the sky is the color of a dewdrop as snowflakes fall. i can hear it weeping.) i hide under the scarf, searching for the musk of home. papa’s spiced leather, momma’s pumpkin pie. storebought cotton stings my nostrils, and i am left gasping for air.

no weeds sprout along the sidewalk anymore. trees grow centered in little squares and i feel dizzy as mr. lee is nowhere to be seen. monogrammed displays sear the backs of my eyelids. where is the awning i spent so many years under? where are the handpainted signs i stacked against the crates? his smile is fading from my memory. (why does it look like a grimace?) “hey!” heart leaping, i turn around. an empty window stares back at me. rubbed away, the letters Lee’s Corner Store.

it is christmas eve and i am stumbling across the city, feet searching for a childhood lost under the asphalt. flyers nailed to brick walls and no chainlink fence to be seen. a woman in sunglasses brushes my shoulder. “oops, sorry.” jackie pauses as i search her eyes. does she remember? she squints. “do i know you?” you used to. snow melts bitter on my tongue and my throat swells too thick to swallow. gingerly, i unbutton the bracelet from my wrist and tie it around hers. “no.” her confusion is palpable in the frosted air.

i whisper to the snowflakes dotting the ground like flowers. they are already melting, already wilting on the pavement. but i used to know you.

“one morning, this sadness will fossilize / and i will forget to cry.” -mitski, fireworks

at night, the last tear cauterizes my tendons

like burning coal and i whisper an apology

to prometheus as the bushfires extinguish.

dried blood coagulates behind my gums

like candied tangerines and rock sugar.

the museum is open for exhibit and

my ribcage is on display; trace the wandering eyes

wreathing fireworks like weeping chrysanthemums.

a voice of rushing water: "here, we see an enlarged heart.

notice the atria dilating, two pupils clutching onto

the memory of love."

at night, the stars waltz and step on my toes.

i breathe in bathroom tile dust and see my mother

smiling in shattered mirrors. watering the petals

of an orchid woven from my eyebags.

houseplants shrivel in cobwebbed cupboards

yet their burned palms still reach for the sun;

why do i keep reaching? (because forgetting leaves no second chances.)

exhaling only relocates the guilt,

pushes edema from bronchi to stomach

so i can breathe easier.

entropy nestles between the bones,

makes a home in the emptiness.

(i shrug off my skin and let it rest there.)

this time, i allow equilibrium to stagnate in my veins.

and i do not light the matches.

january sun does not bleach the insides of my gums how i want it to. blushing alabaster and the first peony buds are one and the same: harsher in the light, splintered on leaves un-crystallizing between evanescence and bruised jade. and so i bathe in fluorescence like a microwave, watch the heat rising and stare at the colors it forms in my palm. [heart line and head line are backward stitched into oblivion; there is a point where you must choose which asymptote to reach for. but how can you decide after knowing the possibility of two infinities is ink-swirled in your identity?] fuschia glares in neon, and it demands my laughter before staining my gums of rose petals and rubbing alcohol. i hand it over. [rain-soaked laughter weighs heavier on my tongue, anyways.]

permafrosted mornings slice my heart open with a carnal kind of anesthesia: isolating my senses one by one until the equation can be solved. jawbone-sharp vision softens into honey-blood between my teeth. magnifying the sound of nothing until it becomes the snow in my veins. the quaking of roots and mud not quite metallic in my nostrils. [synesthesia in spring oscillates at 20 Hz: january cracks its shell open like a rotten pistachio, tired mauve and beetle-wing moss and stale skin.] the thunderstorm has quieted. the rainbow flickers on the inside of my fingers: mulberry jam and prussian blue.

january sun is weaker than i think it is. gaia dilutes the sky with too many tears because she is squeezing the life out of her knuckles to the soil. she wrings the washcloth like my mother and does not see the drops that spatter off the edge of the sink. [spring awakens with a clouded mind and forgets to brush the grime from her eyelids. she reaches to wake the plants, but stops. the plants will thaw in time.]

the plants will thaw in time.

In ancient Egypt, according to the Dead Sea Scrolls, when one died, their heart was removed from their body and measured on a scale as a means to reveal the weight of their worth, for the afterlife, as judged by God.

A week before Thanksgiving 2020, for the second time in his life, my father's stomach was cut open and heart taken out of his body for at least eight consecutive hours and placed on ice while surgeons operated on seven blocked arteries until the arteries could deliver fresh blood to the heart.

I remember wondering what my father dreamed of while he lay on the surgical cot unconscious, while his heart was dissected. I’ll never admit it to anybody, but I’d place big money on it that he came to God and met him in the flesh.

His heart developed problems in his early twenties after he was diagnosed with cancer and treated successfully by a process I don’t really understand called radiation. It’s this radiation that saved him from dying of cancer and this radiation too that forever fucked his heart. If you ask him what he thinks of this, he’ll chuckle and say, “Well.” If he lives another twenty years, it’s more’n likely he’ll have to have open heart surgery again, for a third time, in his mid-eighties.

He's awful damn tough, it doesn't take knowing him too long before realizing it. My oldest brother--not technically his biological son but you'd never know it--always says Dad should have been born a sheriff in the Old West, because the outlaws would have ravaged every town except Dan's town, because even the sickest of criminals would have known, that nobody fucks with Dan.

He walked on at the University of Georgia to play running back, and day-in-and-day-out out ran scout team offense against the number one ranked defense in the country. This is back in 1977, back when slamming a ball carrier to the ground by grabbing his facemask or back of the shoulder-pads or close lining him, one defender high and one at the knees, was not only permitted but encouraged and considered the stuff of skill and talent and regulation.

Each play, after being shit-tackled by future NFL All-Pro defenders, my dad helped himself up, trotted back to the huddle while the defense ran their mouth and high-fived, then he walked up to his position at the line of scrimmage behind the QB who’d take the snap and give the ball off to my father, my father cutting and plowing through the no-god-given-hole against the defensive-line and threw a forearm out against them and the blitzing linebackers, bouncing and jabbing and breaking off tacklers into the secondary, until his forearm bled and fractured and he hollered out a Cherokee war-cry through his mouthpiece being taken down to the earth with brutal force while the whistle blew, going through this sweat and these steps upon the field for hours upon eternal hours every day of the week, and with the ball in his grip his heart beat like itself were a psalm of God.

He taught me how to be tough without having to give me a corny movie-type line on the essence of grit and salt and heart. Otherwise, you could consider him every character Clint Eastwood ever played in a movie. All one need do is watch how my father carries out his life to receive the finest education on how to be Good in this world. He does not complain, under any circumstance, he comes in heavy with the ball in his hands. If the world is tough, one must be even tougher. He showed me this. He never had to speak of his own heart, you can hear it pounding just from being in his presence.

When his heart was removed from his body and placed on ice, a week before Thanksgiving in 2020, for his second time, I wonder what God thought upon seeing such a thing, if it made him smile or weep sentimentally, or if it surprised even him that he had created such a good’n’tough son of a bitch.

we called ourselves painters: crushing dollar-store chalk in one hand & dripping cherry ice pops in the other. we used to think the sky was a convenience-store lotto ticket, & whoever grew the tallest would get to scratch out the clouds one day. you wanted the strawberry-milkshake mornings like warmed nectar on your tongue. i preferred the sun in a blueberry dress; swimming in the sky with grandma’s pearls strung on the stars.

you took a polaroid & caught glimpses of the horizon; mirrored in iced-glass skyscrapers, peeking out in a solo game of hide-and-seek on fifth avenue. i never asked it to, but the horizon found me. in dimmed family restaurant lights, when neon street signs cast little fluorescent butterflies into the air, even in rain puddles the size of potholes. (i didn’t know it then, but the sky was most beautiful reflected in your eyes.)

& so we played hopscotch, jumping into year after year after year until our arms branched out & our bruised knees dragged on the sidewalk.

i. the smell of soap & your mother’s sewing machine whirring you to sleep.

ii. the chinese take-out next door & the upstairs neighbors’ muffled football shows.

iii. being swallowed by musky italian suits, my father’s cufflinks glinting on your ears.

iv. deep-dish pizza fogging the air & our matching beanies.

v. lunch ladies spooning extra gravy on your tray, intercom static in the middle of class. vi. river rushing in my ears as you pointed to the bumps under your skin.

vii. hushed voices after dinner & the upstairs television drowning out my thoughts.

viii. the empty bus seat next to me, filled by a kid who i don’t recognize.

ix. the pictures i find tucked under your bedroom drawer.

x. the letter with no return address.

i am walking on pavement & it feels jumbled between my toes. you are standing next to me, arms pointing for the horizon, looking for a sunrise to paint the color of strawberry sorbet. i rise above the skyscrapers, & my younger self shouts, godzilla! fifth avenue is honking & swarming & we are sitting on empire state. big hearts in the big apple. your polaroid is out & i use the last of our allowance at the seven-eleven. together, we scratch the sky until it shines.

at dusk, we meet in the meadow. fireflies and hyacinths glow in your eyes as we slow dance under the stars. flower petals catch in your hair and darling, you’re blooming as the world sleeps. you’re all wide eyes and flushed cheeks and feet lifted off the ground, and i am silent. let me be your mirror; i exist only for you.

train tickets crinkle in my hands as you board the train. you’re nose-deep in an atlas, tracing your life along a globe too small for your imagination. you used to kiss the valley of my collarbone and the bridge of my neck; yet, here i stand, drowning as your desire snuffs out my candle. would you believe me if i said we could be our own universe?

you’re standing at the edge, waves crashing saltwater on your face. you used to bloom as the world slept, but all i see is the horizon looping infinity in your eyes. you’re poised like a bird, tulle on your dress unfurling like wings to the wind. we’re caught in the crosshairs, baby. where do you stand when the tide turns?

artists breathe life into blank canvases, swirling palette after palette to transform the world. and then they do it all over again. maybe you’re michelangelo, and i am marble waiting to be shaped and molded into something beautiful. the sculpture shines in its luster, but you never wait to see it collect dust. i am your mirror; the moment you traverse the other side, i am nothing. so i release the pause button and kiss you goodbye.

I don't know what Heaven might be and they say before you die you see a flashing of moments that consist of your life in its entirety and I imagine mine will be consumed by great and awful regret and shame but there might be a few glimpses still that sketch their way into the billows of the firmament beyond earth.

I remember my grandfather teaching me how to fish and introducing me to Ray Charles. He taught me how to carry a football and how to treat a woman, how to drive at six years old and how to play chess. Every Friday night I'd stay with my grandparents and he'd set up the living room into a professional wrestling ring and I'd stand way up on the couch and say, with my best Hulk Hogan impersonation, "I hear you been running your mouth old man, now you're gonna get it," and he'd say, "You want some you little whipper-snapper, come get some," before sacrificing his bones for my enjoyment while I body-slammed him on the carpet.

My grandmother grew up on a farm in Athens, Tennessee. She fed the horses and rode one of them each morning, alongside the route of a train, racing it beside the tracks and the conductor would pull down the horn while it blazed on with my grandmother's horse kicking up the dirt of earth like one of God's finest achievements that is the horse.

Her older sister was brought into the world by a drunk doctor who accidentally smashed her head in during delivery and she'd live out her entire life with retarded response mechanisms while understanding everything around her, internally, perfectly fine. She was helpless and brilliant simultaneously. Her name was Pamela-Ann and she had a childish smile even well into her sixties. My grandmother took care of her for her whole life until she died. She's the sweetest woman in the entire world, my grandmother, everyone who knows her agrees and she tried to teach me the piano when I was young, then took a look at my chubby hands and said delicately, "I just don't believe you have the fingers for the piano, Mikers." My brothers have called me Chubby Hands ever since.

My paternal grandfather tried to teach me carpentry just before he passed away. We were building a bench together when he died. He was a tough dude, Jesus he was tough. When he played football in college, leather helmets, there's one play, after a couple martinis he really relished in retelling, and we all loved to hear it, countless times. He got tackled the play previous and some bastard stepped on his face with their cleats and so the next play my grandfather ran the ball right at him, popped him in the jaw with his forearm and broke the asshole's nose.

His wife, my grandmother, comes from a set of parents who were True-Blue Christians and at the turn of the century, over a hundred years ago, were missionaries in China to preach Gospel, sacrificed their health and well-being and Western lifestyle in the name of Jesus. They traveled in a ship across the Pacific through storms and months and starvation, doing what they believed they were called to do. They were persecuted and suffered for years during their mission, all the while maintaining supreme faith in the Christian God.

Now, my family is not particularly Christian, that is none of us were really raised in the church but my grandmother still sings in the Choir every Sunday. There's something Holy in her aura, the way she speaks and how she carries herself, in the enchanting water-color of her eyes. Her soul is next to godliness but she won't tell anybody about it. She's the only live-ass Christian left and I got the privilege of inheriting some of her blood.

These are more than memories, it's the flesh and heart that made me up from darkness, the void of nothing, these are the souls who resurrected my very being from the flakes of dust.