Here’s why I like making things. I like making things because when I was born, everything I was born into was already made for me. Art let me surround myself with something different. Something new. Something real. Something that was mine.
I don’t know if this means I could also be a competent architect. Or a car mechanic. Or a carpenter. I just like constructing new things that are real.
I believe this is a side effect of growing from seed in soil made of lies.
I believe this is a side effect of being born into ruins—this need for construction.
Mom is quiet on our walk up Spruce. I say, “I think you and Dad should get a divorce.”
“You’re sixteen years old,” she says.
I am sixteen, I am ten, I am twenty-three, I am forty. After last night with Bruce, I understand everything. “That doesn’t make me stupid.”
“It means you don’t understand divorce.”
“Do you even love him?” I ask.
She sighs. “I don’t think so,” she says. “In fact, no. I don’t. Isn’t that horrible?”
“It’s not that bad.”
“It’s horrible,” she says. She has tears in her eyes.
“Not really,” I say. “The truth will set you free, right?”
“Easy to say.”
She’s walking too quickly. I decide to slow down to see if she’ll notice. She doesn’t. She just keeps walking. Doesn’t look back. Doesn’t do much else but look both ways at intersections and then crosses streets. I lose sight of her and stop walking. I just stand on the corner of Pine and 17th and nobody is around, really. No chatting friends walk by. No random art students on their way to class carrying large black portfolios, nobody walking their dog, nobody at all. I look up at the sky and feel like someone has me under a microscope.
I am safe—squished between two glass slides. I am easy to read, easy to identify. I am a human being. I am sixteen years old.
Inside my brain lives the image of a woven wire headpiece. It’s the only place it exists—in my brain. If we focus in a little closer, there are many images of the headpiece. Partially made, wire sticking out from many angles. Finished and polished and mounted on a Styrofoam wig stand covered in black linen. Crumbled into a ball, pieces severed with wire snips, in a trash can behind Miss Smith’s desk. If I could go back in time and figure out who did this, if I could go back and stop them, who would I be now?
Look. This isn’t a temper tantrum. I’m not some teenager you can blow off because you made a myth about teenagers being dramatic. You go work hard on something you love. And you find it in the trash like it’s garbage. Tell me how you feel. Tell me what’s missing when you’re done. I can tell you what’s missing. You. You are missing.
I stopped going to school because I was missing. I was either in the past or in the future everyone always talked about. I stopped going to school so I could focus on the now. But the now is my mother telling me she doesn’t love my father. The now was always feeling like something was wrong, only I didn’t know what. The now is one of Carmen’s tornadoes. Since the meat grinder, I am trying to adjust.
Ten-year-old Sarah walks toward me on 17th. Next to her is twenty-three-year-old Sarah. They look well adjusted.
I wave to the ten-year-old Sarah and then focus on twenty-three-year-old Sarah. I ask her, “Do Mom and Dad get divorced?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Right about now,” she says.
“About time,” ten-year-old Sarah says.
“Yeah,” I say.
“I want to see Bruce,” twenty-three-year-old Sarah says.
“Me too,” ten-year-old Sarah says.
“Maybe tomorrow,” I say.
“We can meet at the house,” they say.
“Bruce isn’t going to the house,” I say.
Twenty-three-year-old Sarah says, “Yes he is.”
They are the glass slides on either side of me. They keep me safe under the microscope. Both Sarahs are carrying the umbrella. The umbrella can exist in two time periods and in one space. I can exist in three time periods in one space. Living for the now suddenly seems pointless.
“Do I ever get to find out who stole the headpiece?” I ask her.
“No.”
“Do I stop caring?” I ask.
“No.”
“I have to go,” I say. They both know I’m going to see Bruce. They might even know we’re going to the Mütter Museum. “Please don’t just show up, okay? I really love you both but I want to just be in the here and now for a day.”
“Sure,” they say. “We’re going to the park anyway.”
They walk north. I walk south toward home, where a divorce is waiting for me. I’m oddly happy for Mom.
I am a human being. I am sixteen years old.
She is a human being. She is forty-seven years old.
This should be enough.
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