The Ritual of Skinned Knees

1.)  Pedal hard, the ferns and moss a green streak alongside the road. 

2.) Pedal on the down slope, even, as your heart rises up into your throat.

3.) Allow the wheels of your bicycle to catch on the sand-filled split in the pavement.

4.) Notice how time slows down and the world is absolutely quiet as you fall to the ground, your hands and knees hitting the road.

5.) Now hear your heart as it flies out of your mouth, a yell or a cry or a curse.

6.) Feel the skin of your knees roll away, sand crushing in, the burning of it.

7.) Blow cool air over the red patches. Sit very still while you do this.

8.) Hate your bicycle for a little while, hate the split in the pavement, hate everything until you don't anymore.

9.) Leave your bike lying on the side of the road- no one drives by your house anyway. Go back to the house for a band-aid. You can come back later to get your bike.

The Book of Change

Outside the double window of my purple childhood room there was a great open field bound by evergreens. Behind the trees, hills. And behind those, the modest mountains of southern New Hampshire. Nights passed with blinking red lights in the distance marking elevation, marking the flight paths of airplanes, marking my breath and sleep.

I still have dreams about the barns that stood near the house on Perry Road. One was wide open and wooden, full of hay warm from its own sweet rot. A hay barn is clean because it only has one purpose, contains only one thing. I didn't know the people who came to hay the fields. I'd see them in the summer, small against the evening sky, slinging hay bails onto the flat-bed pulled by a tractor round and around until it was night. After that, the barn would be full and golden, the field blunt and sharp where the hay had been.

The other barn was massive and dark, covered in tar paper, cracks stuck with bits of rubber and rope. I'd walk through stalls upon stalls of unrecognizable hardware and brittle tack- air as old as the things in there, always cooling, always falling to the floor. The hay barn was more comfortable, but I liked this darker, danker barn more.

I cried on the last night I slept in the house on Perry road. The moving truck was loaded and my mattress was on the floor, the only thing left in my empty room. Looking out the double window into the night, I could feel the field, feel the trees around it, feel the bulk of two barns that hadn't changed much in a hundred years.

What's Anti Anyway?

Forrest is learning about the world through his toys, which are a mix of legos and transformers and bionicles. He built something out of all three that was a scary skeleton-horse, and my step-mom said, "Is that your anti-pegasus?" Forrest responded in the derisive tone he uses when you know something he doesn't, "What's an anti-pegasus anyway?" "Well," my step-mom said wandering into the kitchen to make peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches, "Anti means opposite. So if a pegasus is a good horse, an anti-pegasus is a bad horse. If matter means something is something, then anti-matter means it's nothing." Forrest looked toward the kitchen where her voice was coming from with a blank expression. Later, when I was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a white russian, Forrest came over and put something tiny in my hand. I looked at what was the cutest lego creation I've ever seen, a single unit grey lego with a little white skeleton lego head of the same size stuck on top. "That's an anti-mouse," says Forrest very seriously. "Thanks, Forrest, " I say, and kiss him while I burst inside.

"When you organize one of the contradictory elements out of your work of art, you are getting rid not just of it, but of the contradiction of which it was a part; and it is the contradictions in works of art which make them able to represent us- as logical and methodical generalizations cannot- our world and ourselves, which are so full of contradictions." Randall Jarrell

Alice worked out at the gym, did hot yoga, cooked from scratch, rode a bicycle everywhere, grew tomatoes in a little pot on her kitchen windowsill, and worked for a non-profit. In addition to all this, she tried to cultivate healthy relationships. The only thing that didn’t fit was her smoking cigarettes. Her sister argued that this was the obvious reason to stop. “It’s just not you,” she would say. But it seemed to me that this was a very good reason for her to continue smoking- that last habituated trace of her life in New Jersey where she also wore gold jewelry and red lingerie. Otherwise, she would be too cohesive- and when are we ever cohesive unless we are also contrived? Smoking kept her authentic. If she didn’t occasionally smoke, wouldn’t she be like all the other people with eco-sneakers and Sigg bottles; vegetarians (except for fish), avid recyclers, buy-localers?

Well, she did quit smoking. And I think that, more than my moving across the bridge, more than petty jealousies and leonine competition, is to blame for our friendship falling off. I mean, who wants to be friends with an identity?