Childhood is composed only of soft recollected things.

Nothing is strung together in an incisive timeline, and

often I find myself pulling at gauzy memories;

a collected,

 

—Childhood—

 

was an early morning in my mom’s bed,

briefly sitting up to lean on my small, pointed elbows

tossing about in the off-white & rose-patterned comforter.

Lazy, opening my eyes—wet and gauzy—to survey

the world, and when I took a quick look at the rest of the day

coming through the curtains, I put my head back down

to close my eyes again.

 

We were all sleeping, young. Waking up gradually and so

reluctantly, and more often as the sun crept higher

I would bat my eyes to watch a little longer—

 and interpret things gently;

 

like how I could easily tune out the local news, like

when our house got broken into and I reached past my mother

trembling at the drafty shattered window to pick up the spark-

ling shards glass, like when my grandma died and I didn’t feel very

sad about it because the thought of “never again” didn’t really

have meaning to a nine-year-old stunned by the candlelight reflecting

off the burnished pew, like when the old man who had a heart-

attack on the airplane, two hours into our flight, got wheeled off

the vessel in a black bag before all the other passengers. That old man,

who became just some background noise while I colored in a picture

with crayons of the pet-horse I really wanted.