Tethered moon

still but not yet stuck

Today the moon evolved to its final form, and with it came the POP of a double knotted string, falling delicately as if not falling at all. I knew then that the moon had abandoned me…

Yesterday I reached into the sky, tied a piece of Mother’s good yarn around the moon and carried it with me. It shone a spotlight on the fractured driveway of my childhood home as I attempted to ride Brother's bicycle. Its orange frame (or was it green? Who knows) blinded me and sent me headfirst to the red brick wall that enclosed our home. The wall, or so Father says, was meant to protect. That, as young as I was, all that awaited me on the other side was intent on ending me.

So I stayed. Squatted beneath steel gates as I twiddled the yarn between my fingertips and listened to the living pass me by. In conversation. In heated arguments that stretched to heavy silences. Some days, they came in the form of a ball made from the smallest pieces of plastic bags bound by strips of tires. In those moments, I tied the thread to my wrist and kicked the ball to every corner of the wall, indifferent to the color-filled words that flew over the gates, until Mother came to send the ball home.
 
Today the moon evolved to its final form, and with it came the POP of a double knotted string, falling oh so delicately as if not falling at all. I knew then that the moon had abandoned me to cast its light on the world beyond my wall. 

Oh, how lonely it has been. 

I grow ugly with envy at passing conversations so much that my ears begin to wrap them in wool blankets, snuffing out most but not all. Come. Become. Dare. In some moments, I hear them whisper my name. A name, maybe, but it feels as mine as all the stolen conversations had been. So I fantasize of my own conversations. My own quarrels with estranged lovers that leave me with more questions than words can fit. I think of passing the ball to something that could pass it back, and the color-filled words become clearer. Louder. As though they were the only sound to have ever existed, and I climb. Skin my knee over red brick and land on my ass, only to stand and try again and again until I feel the edge kiss my fingertips. 

The lovers, a pair of young women, crouch behind a line of vegetation separating the wall from the street, like soldiers on the front lines. Their eyes widen at my intrusion and I offer them a smile, or what I believe to be its likeness. I look forward to the group of 6 boys divided in half standing between four stones in place of goalposts. They stare cautiously, then square their shoulders and point their chins as though they had been reminded of what they ought to be but aren’t yet. So I produce from behind me their tattered ball, tightly wrapped in Mother’s yarn, and jump.