Dreamer

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I believed, at twelve, that I could be a scientist.  I read a book a day.  I believed I could be a writer, an actress, a professor of English in Rome, an acrobat in a purple spangled outfit.  Days opened for me like the pulling apart of curtains at a play you've been dying to see.  I had a microscope on my desk, shelves full of books and treasures that I found outside:  Rocks, wood, abandoned nests of hornets and birds, notes to myself for things to do tomorrow because I hadn't had the time today.  I believed the way to ride bareback was to get on and go, the rising heat of the horse against your bare legs the only instruction you'd need.  The how of everything was simply in the doing of it.  I had a turtle in a plastic bowl and I fed him flies I captured with my bare hands and to whom I apologized before killing.  I had a crow living outside my window, I spoke to all the dogs in the neighborhood here on Pine Street, and they understood me.  I patted them so hard dust rose up off their backs into tiny, dim clouds, and they understood this, too.  They stood still for it for as long as I would do it, their eyes closed in itchy pleasure.  My life was like a wild, beating thing, exotic, capable of unfolding and enlarging itself, pulling itself higher and higher up like a kite loved by the wind, and it was captured beneath my cereal bowl.  There in front of me, my own for the taking.  And then, suddenly, lost.