Jan 17 2009
Story: My Freedom
“Take me with you where you go. Let me come along?”
I didn’t always know where I was anymore. It didn’t seem to matter though since everything was the same everywhere. Lights lit up, cars honked their horns, the wind blew cold, and there I was standing in the middle of it all isolated and restless.
Each night through a choppy sleep I’d focus on contrasting pictures of long woods and meadows as they’d dance through my head seducing me like a piper piping. I wasn’t in any shape to leave the city, but I’d always felt down deep that I’d be more at home in an open field with a bottle of wine and the Earth’s wonderful vibration underneath me purring. The constant grinding of big city sounds made me feel as if those dreams were all too impossible.
By morning, my feet would hit the pavement heavy as I’d struggled to walk into the boring, repetitive, unnatural cityscape. There used to be one part of the walk that I enjoyed, but after Jacob died it wasn’t the same. Each day for the last 2 months I’d tell myself I wasn’t going to walk down Main Street anymore, but something made me come by to see the corner where he used to stand anyway. It was even out of my way and I didn’t need to be reminded about it, but it readied me for that bottle of Scotch.
“I’m dying here too you know. I think you can help.”
It’s 3 o’clock and this foot of mine is still hurting me. Every step seems to make it just a bit worse and even though I keep trying to step right or left, on the edge of my foot or with one behind the other in a line, it just doesn’t seem the pain wants to leave me. “Don’t be such a baby”, my Father would say. “Shake it off”, he’d say. Somehow those things stay with me even now no matter where I am or what I do, but I think I’ll look for some stairs to sit a while. This foot needs resting no matter what my Father says.
I found some nice, solid stairs where the number reads 750 out on Lexington Avenue. I doubt I can stay here long since someone will surely come out and ask me to leave. Even so, this was somehow better than that park bench, regardless of the people rushing by me so serious and blank.
They weren’t missing a beat yet they were missing everything at the same time. It felt as if I stopped just one of them society as we know it would cease to be, clocks would stop and cars would crash. They were all such important people with important lives and important things to do, but not once did they see the ground they walked on or the tree they ran past or the children’s shelter they stood in front of on their important cell phone call. They all seemed to find a way to be outside of the world yet making the world happen all at once.
Across the street at a market two men exchange some heavy words and it cuts through the clutter. I’m unsure what they’re fighting about, but they seem to carry on just the same. The empty-faced people walking by pay no mind and just walk by as if they weren’t even there. The tall, angry man shouts, waving his arms as he pushes the short, stocky man who seems apologetic. Abruptly, the taller man walks back into the market and once again the sounds of the street fill my ears again.
“The cold air keeps the sound of that stream still for me”
The rain is coming. The sky turns over with dark clouds and I admire the way they take over my world with such power and beauty. The rain changes me. It washes me away like a woman’s smile. It stops the men at the market from fighting, it makes people run and it keeps dreams alive as it cleans away yesterday’s failure. It keeps the boat afloat. The rain washes it all away.
I wish I could be more like the rain. I wish I could change you and me. To be the water falling from the sky onto windows and into gutters, through the hair of children playing and the feathers of birds flying must be an incredible feeling. To feel the wind guiding my every move through an otherwise impossible world would be relaxing. The rain is free. The rain is mercy.
“I believe in your glass dream. Bring me there.”
I better start walking before it starts. I don’t own an umbrella and all that sitting didn’t help my foot as much as I’d hoped. I’ll go past the man on the corner selling roasted peanuts just so I can bring the smell home with me. There can’t be many things better than fresh roasted peanuts floating in the cold air.
Two blocks away from home and I could see people climbing the stairs to their homes to unlock their front doors. I can see two cars fighting over a parking space, but both wind up illegally parking anyway. I pass a group of slow walking people who seem to have formed a blockade against me. They swayed side to side over and over faking me out until I learned of their pattern.
“I’ve been looking for that one sign to guide me.”
As I approach one set of stairs I find a woman sitting, crying. Her hair blowing in the breeze against the brick of the apartment building made me pause just long enough for her to lift her head and take notice of me staring at her. I knelt down next to her and learned she had just realized the locket her grandmother had given her was missing from around her neck.
I don’t remember how many times we walked around the city that night looking for it and I seemed to have forgotten about Jacob, the people around me or that my foot ever hurt at all. I used the last of my money to buy an umbrella that we shared and we saw all types of things. She asked me all types of questions and I listened to her stories about her grandmother, but we never did find the locket. In looking for it, however, I found something else. I found my freedom.
Her name was Molly.
