101 Words

The day I turned nine I received my very first pair of bell bottoms. They were groovy, I dare say; bright white and turquoise, fitting just right as they hung off my hips and flared out at the knees. I wore them the entire day and into the next. I was, after all, a flower child of the 1960s.

As I struggle to get through this thing called life, I wonder what ever happened to that bell bottom girl. But, like looking into a 3D picture, I relax my mind and eyes and find her there, hiding behind the wonder years.

He walked away in the waning moonlight of mid-summer believing the story had reached the edge and plunged into the past.

She couldn’t forget the taste of his lips, smokey and sweet, and he drowned her memory in bottomless whiskey bottles.

She walked away from him in the sun-bright afternoon, the magnitude of her footsteps echoing. Looking back, eyes bleary with fiery sadness, she waited for memory to ink itself into permanence.

But they couldn’t forget, so she wrote rivers of words so that he might hear, and he played his guitar wondering if notes were enough to bring her home.

Seven year old Bindiya didn’t know how to write — especially to God. So, she bought a balloon, by selling her rag doll and two marbles she had found while picking polyethylene bags from trash cans.

She stuck a tiny piece of her mother’s old blouse to the balloon.

Her mother groaned from a tiny cot, at the back of the dark room.

Outside, Bindiya let the balloon go.

“Make Amma well!” she shouted, as she watched the balloon, until it was a tiny speck in the sky. Then, gone.

“Bindiya is that you?” Amma called.

She smiled, it was working already!

We drove through a blizzard today to see you. On those old, narrow Chester County roads that twist; the farm-to-markets that wind. But when we arrived, they told us visiting hours had been canceled, due to the storm. I made the mistake of telling Nick, “I wish I could scream.”

So Nick rolled down the windows, and opened us up to the cold. “Scream like there is no one listening,” he said. “Do it!”

And there was no one listening, so back down those roads I screamed and I screamed; the whole time thinking about you, and wishing you were here.