Out the window
20 July 2011 07:03 AM Categories: Writing prompts
What was inside was bloody, raw, contained in plastic and paper towels and then the butcher’s paper, like it was your heart, or maybe even part of your brain, some vital part of you that held you back, but something that you needed, too, and then it was push up the window and toss it out and nobody was there to catch it, to hear the thud, to notice what you were doing.
You threw caution out of a side window by a part of the house where no one travels, near the winding blackberry bush and the invasive trumpet vine. You threw it and forgot about it and inside whatever it was, that vital part, just rotted away, and you told yourself how foolish it was to toss it out the window as you stitched the wound and changed the bandages.
The scar was ridiculous, too, a sign of your haste, your foolishness, this lightning rod on the side of your chest, like the clichéd tattoo of a teenager. “I’m stuck with it now,” like you were stuck with every other bad decision. You skin was crisscrossed with marks from other times, the times you let your boundaries be violated (so many small marks in the same place created a trough across your stomach), the indentations of withdrawal, the craters on your feet from all the running away.
To experience the metaphorical as the physical is a gift, a curse, a way to read the past and to hide from the future. In the bathroom, a cabinet of salves and gauze and ace bandages awaits. Wrap yourself protectively. Sit in the sun and reflect. Let caution grow again in you, slowly, a small protective thing. Let your decision-making be brave, do not toss the caution away, nurture it but ignore it when it leads you in the wrong direction. Just don’t kill it.
You are not brave, but you can be. Act as if, as if you had the heart and mind of someone else, as if you were whole, as if the most important thing in the world was the separation and then the connection, the only way to live life fully.
From the prompt "Out the window."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by Debbi Long.
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