Power Hour #1

It’s been too long. This quiet of the night, an escape from continuity. Looking out of my window, I see a bird. She’s quiet and alone. Seems content in her solitude. The others know not to bother her. Silence used to not bother me. But I’ve been enveloped in a cacophany of lies, and now, when all I have are my thoughts, I feel pain.

It’s not that I regret anything I’ve done. I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. I’ve had my name in the paper. People wait on my beck and call. But it’s not enough. Why is it not enough?

Sometimes I have waking dreams, moments of non-reality, fantasy absorbed. I yearn for a childhood imagination, some purity of soul. I miss that closeness with truth. Everything seems obscured, painted with a muddy black tone. I can’t figure out what to do now.

I dream, and I wish I could stay there. I remember, because I must and I wish I could forget. The past strangles. My lungs contract, as if my shadow seizes my nerves. I hate anxiety, because I cannot control it. Why do I remember this now? Why can’t I control my mind?

There are things you wish you could take back. I feel an overwhelming sense of jealousy. This bird has no regrets. She lives in the now and she does not need. Her bodily functions are fulfilled. Sleep is nothing more than an escape. But this bird needs no escape because there is nothing to fear.

I used to look out of the window all the time. I have no time anymore. I remember when time was a friend to me. I close my eyes and I remember the day my grandmother died.

That day, the fog was back. Yesterday, the fog blanketed over our town. And the day before that. In fact, for the entire month, fog was part of our lifes, ever present. The weather reporter called it a once in a lifetime event. All the flights in the local airport were cancelled. I remember hearing the word bankruptcy and wondering why all the adults were making such a fuss. Such a silly sounding word, nonsensically spelled. Nowadays, all the reporters talk about are bankruptcies. But back then, all that existed was the fog.

My room was tiny. When I was a kid, my sisters made me watch a scary movie. My sisters made me do all sorts of unpleasant things: I painted their nails, cleaned the dog’s messes, and listened to stories about older boys with hair in places I didn’t know that hair grew there. But my sisters loved to change the channel to the movie channel, but only when I was trapped in the room and something particularly frightening was playing. In this scary movie, the space man was locked in a padded cell. I used to name the characters in the movies because I couldn’t pronounce their actual names. A lisp is God’s way of saying, “I don’t like you very much.” I named the man in this movie Bob. He was like me, imprisoned by a very mean person. I was rooting for this guy. “Yeth! You can do it!” My “thisters thnickered”. I didn’t care. Bob tried time and time again to break out of his cell. He took a nail file, a tool I despised, and chiseled it down into a lock pick. For at least twenty minutes in movie time, which is an eternity in child time, he worked at that lock. When the guards came to drop off his sad meal, Bob would hide it in his shoe. He was the man I wanted to be, strong enough to fight. I remember the sound of his lock pick breaking. I remember wishing that it was a sick joke. And I remember watching for the next hour, watching Bob resort to clawing at the walls, biting at the bars, ramming his head into the door. My sisters kept asking me if I wanted them to turn off the tv. But I was mesmerized. Bob had to make it out. So I endured. Then I remember watching his mind snap. The music stopped. Bob stopped talking. I didn’t like that. He had a voice of courage. He couldn’t lose. Then the padded walls started to creep in. And they moved ever so slightly inch by inch. I counted the amount floor tiles and saw each one disappear. And then the walls had reached Bob. They pressed on his body and he screamed. This wasn’t a scream of rage against his captors like he yelled before. This was a shriek. It felt like baby spiders crawled up my back when I heard that. The walls kept on squeezing in. His cries got quieter and quieter. And then there was a black screen and the credits.

I ran up to my room, sprinted with all my limited strength. I walked from corner to corner heel to toe. The room was thirty by twenty child feet. Much too small to stay there. So I left. I packed my candy, my comics and my pillow in my back pack and I left.
When I opened the front door, the fog was there. I reached out to touch the fog and it touched back. A little remnant of the hanging cloud swirled in my hand. I tried to look out, see if it was safe to run away. My sisters were talking quietly in the tv room. I could hear them say how much they regretted letting me watch that movie. I remember them making plans to do something nice for me, take me to the park, or the dock or the puppy store, but only when the fog cleared. I stood there in the door and hated the fog. I couldn’t stay home, but I couldn’t leave. I blew into my hand and my little held fog was gone.
I tried to take a step forward. My skin felt like it was sweating, but it wasn’t hot. One foot at a time I left the house. I took another step forward and the front door began to fade away. I moved toward what I thought was the birch tree in our front yard. And then the whole house was gone, swallowed by the fog.

Then there was the scream. I remember that scream because it was the same scream Bob cried out when he was about to die. I remember that scream because that was when my sisters found my dead grandmother’s body. I was there alone in the fog. And it was all quiet for a couple minutes. For the only time in my life, I was at peace.