(veryearly)morningwrite duo

Paint springs from my fingers like it's as alive as the shadows that blink on and off on the stage floor, catching bare toes on their edges for such a small moment that no one seems to notice, but their feet move faster, pretending they are everything that's never been untouched. The curtains fall as lumps onto the floor, appear to have strangers sleeping beneath them in the dark, but we peek and find only a few fistfuls of beads, strung to each other like paths that lead nowhere into the trees for the things with no legs to follow.

I write now like I wrote then but I can't remember when exactly maybe the time I sat alone at the kitchen table, the hole in the ceiling above me round as a halo, the plywood that would later cover it leaning against the wall beside my chair. Mom's footsteps crossed paths with Dad's as they did grown-up things like dusting and slipping crisp, folded bills out of envelopes, other things I didn't understand. I tried to think of why my teddy bear was so important, what life was like through his scarred plastic eyes as he watched my dad grow and then met me and experienced his first of many tea parties. I wrote down my thoughts and then strung in extra lines to rhyme with each. I was so proud that I wrote another page about my favorite color, yellow. By the end of my third grade year, the neon colored horses on my Lisa Frank journal had grown a few grey streaks from my opening and closing the cover so often. The first time I heart of electroconvulsive therapy was at the library after school in sixth grade when my best friend was trying to explain to me why Hitler was such a bad person. It was nestled in with descriptions of a lot of other horrible methods of torture that I couldn't quite fathom, and I felt the idea of it growing more distant with each click of a keyboard or turn of a page around us.