This is another little piece to that bigger piece I'm working on. Because you don't know the background you may not understand everything, but please humor me in pretending you know what's going on enough to let me know what you think.
Elma
“Her hands were a dense network of wrinkles, like a little system where the nervous sweat poured down the crevasses of her flexed fingers into her palms. She sat waiting for the screen door to creak open and me to slip through it. But that night the screen door would not open and I would not return home until the sky turned pale green and the sun crept up from behind the hills.
The tall grass brushed my ankles as I swung from that tire swing and my hair flew back and then rushed like flames past my cheeks as I gained speed. As I went higher, pumping my legs back and forth, I threw my head back and looked at the swelling sky then at the grass as my feet flew up in the air. It was cool outside. Not warm, not cold but cool—almost refreshing.”
I look back on what I wrote then… what I thought then…and I don’t see another girl. Reminiscing is supposed to bring me back to another time, to another me… but it’s still the same me. I can still feel that girl somewhere inside, closer to the surface than I thought. I feel like it was only a day ago when I was sneaking out of my mom’s house—like fifty years of my life were no more than one single year. But then I look down at my hands, the wrinkly old stumps of my fingers that used to be long and graceful. Look at my face, a million wrinkles folding it up on itself, like a wrinkled up paper where a clean sheet once was, waiting patiently to have a story drawn on it. Ha. I suppose my story has been drawn on there a couple of times more than it should have been… drawn and erased, crumpled up and thrown out so many times that now, the crinkled evidence is all I have to show. I look down at my legs, my knees are bags of skin, and my ankles are lumpy stumps. I wish I could see my heart, the one organ that I depend on,
the one that will work from the day I’m born to the day I say goodbye. My heart is still young, pure, smooth, soft—it is still keeping time to my song however the tune has changed throughout the years, my heart is still my own.
I was reading about these older women who are getting face lifts, botox, all sorts of surgery to put their face back the way it was. They want to erase the story drawn on them and start anew, like they were young girls again. Once you get to be my age you can’t just go back and erase everything that you’ve done, everything that you’ve been through; life is laid out like a story line, with a begging, middle, and end. You only get to live each chapter once, you can’t go back and you can’t skip to the end without experiencing everything in the middle first. The way I see it, the more wrinkles you have, the more gray hairs on your head, the baggier your limbs…the better you have lived life; you didn’t simply glide through the begging and middle of your story, you wrote it… lived it… and now you carry the evidence like it is something to be ashamed of. Don’t be ashamed, be grateful…it may be the end, but you’ve made your story worth reading.
