This Semblance of Movement :: Creative Writing Essays

This Semblance of Movement Afraid because my walking hurts the ground. Hesitate. That there would be nothing left to write. There are cracks in everything we've made. That does not mean futility. Father's faith in truth and then this stubborn repetition but what if. The moon looked paper-thin tonight. So I thought if I could slide more softly from now on. Sifting Liquid I am peeling off the liquid skin of a memory. Pulling crooked strings out of a silent field of dreams, sister keeps asking what she's missing in me. The sky was three shades of blue tonight, glass stars and frozen landscapes, caught in the pantomime of living. Time unfolds its battered wings and in that space I smile. Stealing blankets and the young girl fell. My first day home from the hospital, she only wanted to play, but reaching to tug, share a piece of my soft security, she tripped, cut her chin. The first blood of our tenuous intimacy. There was a safety scissors haircut (Mr. Rogers would have done it that way) and hours under chairs looking everywhere and up. Entranced by mobiles moving across distance, light, and eyes. In my crib, I would stand, arms reaching out for her, babbling. She, translating thoughts before lips knew how to form. My mother recalls a time early on when she woke in the middle of the night to noises down the hall. A four-year old and a three-year old at two in the morning, laughing. We had been building a bridge of cards from her bed to mine, so that we wouldn't fall in the water between us if we wanted to hold hands. The most unlikely of stories I never thought to question. Sister, less than a year old, lying on her mother's stomach. Head down, moving with the rhythm of familiar breath. One word. Baby. To discover, shortly after, for two months their silence had been shared. I remember the ways we used to pretend. In the water, we could have been dolphins, at home different versions of Barbie and Ken. Our Barbies lost countless heads perfecting dives off sofa's end and to think that's how I spent my years. Do I laugh or merely cry. When we played I think I was always the boy but I don't know if that changed the way I feel.