Volume 20: Horizontal Lines

When Juliana was five years old
She liked to look at the big tree picture on the hallway wall
She liked the way it showed her mommy and her daddy
And her grandmas and grandpas
And aunts and uncles and cousins
She used to reach up as high as she could
And trace the black lines all the way downwards and sideways
Until
At the very bottom
Her fingers landed on her own picture
It hung at the end of an up-down line
Which came from the middle of a sideways line
That ran from her daddy's picture to her mommy's
She thought it looked like the letter T
She liked it

When Juliana was seven years old
Her aunt and her uncle got married and had a little baby
Her mommy and daddy hired a man to stand in front of the big tree on the hallway wall
He had a plate with lots of colours of paint on it
He drew a line called horizontal from Juliana's aunt to her uncle
Then he drew a line called vertical right down the middle of the horizontal one
And at the end of the line he drew a picture of the baby
Juliana wished the baby were bigger so she could show it the tree
She wondered if the baby would like all the lines
If its favourite would be the horizontal line between its mommy and daddy
Just like hers was
Juliana smiled at the tree
She liked it

When Juliana was nine years old
Her mommy and daddy started fighting
They fought at the dinner table
They fought in the car
They fought over everything
Every time they fought
Juliana would sit in the hallway
And look at the big tree
She would look at her favourite horizontal line
And sometimes
When the fighting was especially loud
The line would become a little bit blurry behind the tears in her eyes
It might have been her imagination
But every time it did
The fighting seemed to get less noisy
She wasn't sure if she liked it

When Juliana was eleven years old
Her mommy and daddy stopped fighting altogether
They started packing boxes instead
And they hired the painter man back
But this time his paint plate only had one colour on it
White
Like the wall behind the big tree in the hallway
So Juliana took her own little paintbrush
Dipped it in the white paint
And carefully traced the same horizontal line she'd traced with her finger
When she was five years old
But this time
It disappeared completely
And her picture was left to float all alone
In a sea of silent white
She didn't like it at all

Volume 19: Wings

She was a girl
Of years ten and eight,
Stuck in a fight that was not hers.
Her years ten and eight
Were enough to thrust responsibility in her hands:
Power and freedom
That she had no idea how to use.
To her, these were just words,
Lying words that sounded full
Of hope and promises
But she knew that in the dusk of reality
These words were nothing but shadows,
Hollow and slowly fading into the darkness.
Each night she prayed for wings
Wings to lift her up and out of this place.
But each night the shadows grew
Darker and longer,
Stretching over everything she had ever known
Plentiful were those ominous shadows,
Clouding her mind,
Clouding her vision,
Clouding her reality.
Until one day they led her to the old tress bridge
That rested halfheartedly over the river.
That day,
As she saw eighteen years' worth
Of snapshot memories
In a kaleidoscope slideshow,
As the icy water rushed up to meet her,
She smiled.
For that was the day
She finally grew wings
Grew wings to fly,
To lift her up out of the shadows
And into a place of true promise.

Volume 11: The Photograph

That photograph looks better

Lying on the floor,

Dangerously close to the fireplace,

Trapped inside its chipped wooden frame,

Topped with a sprinkling of glass.

There, it is a better representation of

Who we are.

Everything about that photograph is wrong.

Who are those smiling people?

They are certainly not like that now.

They are strangers to me,

And strangers to each other.

And that unblemished white background?

It shouldn't be white at all.

It should be stained with midnight tears,

Cut up with sharp words,

And clouded by the silence that hangs in the air,

The aftermath of a huge mistake.

I would much rather have taken a pair of scissors,

And cut those people apart from each other,

And scattered them in the blizzard

That whips hungrily outside my window as I speak.

I would rather sacrifice the photographic shreds

To the claws of that ravenous beast

So that it may snatch them up

And take them far away from this place.

But I can't.

So I just let the frame fall from my hands

Onto the fake laminate

And hope that, by shattering the glass,

I can give those people a chance

To breathe

Instead of suffocating beneath

Their smiling masks.

Volume 26: The Robin

I open my eyes to the sounds of the city.

Yawning, I unfurl my stiff fingers.

They are a little blue at the tips, but I am used to it by now.

We both are.

A breeze brushes swiftly past us,

Probably hurrying off to work, Starbucks in hand.

There is something different about the air this morning.

A small bird hops across the sidewalk;

It has ordinary grey-brown feathers but its chest in a bold shade of vermillion – a robin.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, the gentle voice of a kindergarten teacher tells me that a robin is the first sign of spring.

Just the sight of it chases away the bleak memories of winter.

I watch as the bird opens its wings and takes flight, carrying the heaviness of my heart away into the sky.

My smile fades when I notice that the small figure huddled beside me has, after a long, harsh winter, stopped shivering.