I’ve been asking myself over and over again, why did I leave the gun behind? Traveling cross-country no money in my pocket and a puppy at my side, why would I leave protection in a bedside table?
The dome’s a cool place if it didn’t sit inside a LOUISIANA trailer park housing mostly newly released convicts, career crack-heads and unstable people on disability checks. They came with the property my father was buying to establish his retirement. Built-in revenue he said, well sort of. If they paid their rent.
The dome’s a cool place for a non-published writer to die. No one to discover you, except the burglar who thinks the place has been quiet long enough and wants to see what’s left… doubt he’d report the dead body… more likely seeing my demise as a jackpot. Would my starving pets eat me? No, not the cats, left a window open, they can flee and scrounge outside. My dog could break through the broken sliding glass door, thus freely roaming for food. Maybe they would develop a wisdom about the trains that travel beside the property. But my bird, my precious Red Headed Amazon, he would surely starve to death, trapped in his ornate cage.
The phone is usually out, the electricity comes and goes. I restlessly worry, will my dad have enough money left over after cigarettes and DVDs to pay the past due amounts? Is he sitting in the dark in Texas too? I imagine my heart cracked and peeling like the paint on the walls. I think he’s forgotten me here.
Sometimes the internet works, and provides a life-line to friends from another age. I think, Yes, he had enough left over! I write and write and write then sometimes that little green light on the modem comes on and broadcasts a connection. I quickly send an attachment to them and ask that they not read it, but put it away in a folder on their hard-drive, just in case. I also compose a Will which I email and snail mail to the same said friends so they know what I’d like them to do with the contents of my storage in AZ and my pets in LA… just in case.
“Clean out that empty one” he said. I see yellow sticky-strips coated in fly carnage hanging in what should be a condemned trailer. I take a quiet liking to a long haired guy with a wicked smile. He is a crack-head and too skinny for me… I do not entertain this attraction, but I think about it a lot. I have a lot of time to think. One day his tobacco smelling mother tells me they are leaving. In a strange way I mourn. I realize for the first time why people make bad choices when it comes to lovers. When all you think you can have is what you see in front of you, you choose as best you can. Sometimes you forget that there is so much more beyond the walls that contain you, beyond the length of a road or a city or a family.
My meds are running out my blood pressure is rising, my mind is grasping at straws! MyGODi’mgonnadieinthisplace! I feel the weight of solitude squeezing my heart. I grab my Beagle Bailey, one suitcase, some papers and flee. Not for the first time in my life, for my life.
Flight seems to be a pattern. From an abusive mother, to a string of abusive lovers, and again from an emotionally abandoned father. Seems I am always running away from something, rather than toward something. Why is it always an act of desperation rather then a deliberate well planned process? Skills I guess I still haven’t learned.
I leave much more than a gun behind. Choices I will regret I made. It doesn’t matter that consciously I didn’t know I wouldn’t be back. Guilt does not allow for reason. I simply fled to save my life.
I think about the dome a lot, like a place I lived many lives ago. When Katrina hit, I wondered if there was anything left of my abandoned memories and could my cats still be alive, if they had survived somehow before the storm. I already knew my bird was dead, living only a couple weeks after I left. I picture red and green feathers and Aubrey’s yellow roses floating among the corpses I saw on CNN. This is my memory of Louisiana. No longer purple beads and powdered white beignets. Louisiana lives in my mind now as a sweaty taste of a hell I climbed into and somehow crawled out of.
Now I know why I left the gun behind.
I was drowning long before the rain came. |
