Flight Risk

I am living in this paradox of normalcy and drinking Club Soda from the mouth of the bottle licking germs from strangers. I'm reading biographies of men I've met in another life; men with such strife and stubborn convictions they bring their own young to their knees. I keep referring to the same random fact: Kangaroos eat their own offspring.

These instances stay with you; the experience doesn't follow you but moves along beside you. While I think of this, I look down and see that my hands are the color of summer rain in a satin base.

I will look back at this point in my life, when I was sleeping just to smell familiarity woven into cotton threads and feel overcome with a tiredness I will never learn to articulate. But by then, no one is asking me to. I'm offering a stuttered explanation to drawn, bored faces.

Those months were a time when strangers remarked that I was what you call a flight risk- only months had gone by and even the post office was having difficulty keeping up with me. In this same time of awakening, I started straightening my hair and using sand paper at a rate that alarmed both my roommates and my landlord. When the dust settled, so did a mess of curls against my shoulders.