I pick up the TV remote and click the off button in the middle of a rerun of The Big Bang Theory. It’s raining. The balcony door is open and I listen to the drumming of water on pavement. After a break this afternoon, during which I slept, the phone began to ring again. Friends, call centers, wrong numbers…
I twitch inside my skin…suddenly feeling crowded. I feel wrong and I can’t name it. All I know is that I don’t want to talk.
In particular, I don’t want to talk about cancer. I am trying to remember what it was like to have other discussions, but the two hour chemo class today has dumped chemotherapy and all its ramifications into my head again – and my brain is bulging with information I wish I could just forget for one night.
So I listen to the rain and...
*****
It’s 1964. I am a sixteen year-old runaway, living on the streets in New York City. It is night time and I am somewhere just outside The Village. It is raining. I am standing across from an Orange Julius stand, watching the lurid reflection of the neon sign flash in the puddles. There are speakers attached to the outside of the stand and “The Sounds of Silence” is playing to an almost deserted street. I stop where I am, with the rain soaking my clothes and the song sinking into my bones.
There is my overturned life then and now. There is that young girl, alone in New York – sad, but with her whole life ahead of her. And somehow it doesn’t feel linear anymore. There are crowds of me. Sometimes, I wish I could free us all.
4 comments:
It's official: I'm positively addicted to your blog. Your posts, all the comments, all of it. You are one in a million, dear Linda. No, make that one in a trazillion! Thank You!
OK. You just made me cry.
Although I try to write for myself most of the time, I have to admit that it's really nice not to feel like I'm talking to the air. Thanks for taking the time to read.
beautiful. you are a bright light, Linda. xo
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