Phenomenology

I ride my bike down the road that separates our house from the neighbors’ land. John Root owns the woods, thin trees that in a few years time will be logged, but right now are still standing. He lets us play. Leaf litter and huckle berries.

Mom tells us that before I was born, his brother, whose name I can’t remember, was dying. Cancer, probably. And our cat, Mossy, who catches bats and rides in the mail truck and is older than I am at the time, she went over to the neighbors house when it happened. Sat on his sick bed and knew it was the time for saying goodbye. 

Riding down the road, our house is on the left, painted black, with its big yard. A patch of strawberries for me, and rhubarb for my brother, right along the fence line topped with barbed wire. There’s a swing set and a trampoline I get thrown off of and an overturned canoe. There’s cherry trees and a picnic table. There’s a statue of Buddha in the side yard. No one can tell me anything about it, besides the fact he’s always been there. 

The land was a dump in another life. 

Going up the road is the cell tower and the abandoned elementary school. The school will be burned, around the same time as the trees coming down. I think the basketball court is still standing. I know the cell tower is. 

Going down, riding down the road, is the bakery. The owners have kids, younger than I am. I watch them climb trees and their parents give me baked goods. We stand in the kitchen, and watch the making. We play hot wheels on hot plastic decking. 

Riding down to the bakery, and it turns from dirt to gravel to gravel parking lot. I lose control of my bike. Fear, going over landscaping boulders and crashing into the short trees with sharp needles. Protect your head and scrape up the knees. 

On the left one, a couple cuts a few inches long, not deep, but infected. We go to the swimming pool, and I dunk it in the water, feeling the sting. Picking out rocks and scraping off goo, pulling off a thick mat of dead skin, red and green and yellow, baptized in chlorine. 

I still have the scars. They’re what taught me my left and right, able to sense it. Poor sense of direction. “Which way is left,” still, when I’m older and learning to drive.

It’s last Friday, and I’m standing in the school of my boyfriend in a room full of hopeful future expertise. And I’m ravenously jealous. And I want to be potential. And I’m proud.

But right now this is the only story I feel capable of telling.