Member-only story
I Still Am What I Aways Was
The circle of my life
Was I really seventeen once
Pee my pants scared of a world barreling toward me,
too much of idiot to realize it could kill me
Young, naive, afraid of changing, terrified of not
I sat impossibly high on a bluff
overlooking the Mississippi River
High meaning I carried a bottle of stolen whisky
up a four hundred foot deer path
The cliff was way up there too
No money, my rich friends off to college
Studying careers set by parents the day they were born
I wanted something, anything,
anything but what I had and what I was
Stupidly poor
Single mother working herself to death
to just feed her three boys
Just me, alone,
wondering what it all meant
and what I should do
The whiskey failed to show me the way
I sat for hours, finally sleeping in the sun
Scrambling down way past dark
Determined to move forward
Not sure if forward might really be backward
But I couldn’t let the world
turn…
