The innocence that was ripped off my bones in 1985 when my parents, howling and shrieking like wolves claiming a carcass, divorced. A tri-fold teal wallet with $20 in it at SeaWorld San Diego in 1991 because I was coiling myself around a rope jungle gym. Glasses with round frames with square yellow glass inside at Glacier View Ranch summer camp when I was fifteen, during a backpacking trek to a glistening lake on some mountain top. My nerve to kiss Jason Basham, a skater boy from Arizona wearing Vans shoes, white uneven socks, denim oversized shorts, a black t-shirt with a long-sleeved flannel, and a black flat-cap worn backward, whom I met on a Carnival Cruise to Mexico in 1995.
In 1998 my virginity in some godforsaken place in Colorado, which thankfully the years have blurred the memory. A clear with black sparkles retainer in a Taco Bell that my brother worked at in 2000. My self-respect from 2000-2005 when I willingly and knowingly stayed with the monster who ravenously devoured it one bite at a time. Along with a diamond solitaire ring, a marriage in 2004 with the suffocating invisible bonds finally releasing me to freedom. In 2006 the consent to settle, gaining the fire back into my once blackened eyes, striving for respect and unconditionality in relationships.
The vain assumption that mortality didn’t apply to me with a cape draped across my shoulders in the summer of 2006 when while in a mute cubicle, I heard my immortal cousin was found dead only identifiable by his feet at twenty-nine in the San Juan Mountains in Colorado. My favorite pair of brown leather with gold eyelet Doc Martens shoes that had never shown a stitch of wear after eight years when I was twenty-six moving from Oahu to Maui. Socks every time I throw them in that greedy monster that heats them up before devouring every fiber. A gray Lucky Brand T-shirt while moving into an original plantation house in Wailuku, HI in 2009 after finding that love can happen after your world crumbles.
My faith when I learned that not one but two of my children are Autistic in 2013 in a blindingly white room at Shriner’s Hospital for Children in Honolulu, HI. My damned mind, yes every time I had to unearth my chain mail and shield going to another IEP meeting hearing some overbearing whino behind her desk scratching off accommodations that my eager child needed while they watched with droopy eyes as a dog who hungrily eats the perfect medium steak off my plate and got scolded. Patience seeing my clever clogs children not listening to me, so they say, and making identical mistakes as I did from 2001 to just yesterday.
A teal, irregularly shaped cotton scarf with vibrant colored puzzle pieces painted on it that a customer’s Autistic son had lovingly made for me and shipped to Hawaii from Tennessee in 2014. Youth has been fleeing after I turned thirty-five, despite putting graffiti on my face my mind is still intact. The ability to go drink Jaeger bombs, dance on bar tops to
resounding music and still be able to get up after two hours of sleep to work a shift without a ping in my head after turning thirty-five.
A dutiful Father-in-Law in 2016 to liver cancer that he had harshly kept to himself. Two devoted grandmothers and a Mother-in-Law in 2019, 2021, and 2023 to dementia eerily remembering oddities from the time before time; the disease stealing their mind while their shell of a body withers to skin stretched over bone. Sense of taste and smell when Covid drove me at ludicrous speed to a sterile hospital room for a dull, ceaseless week around Thanksgiving in 2021.
My white speckled horse Lucille when I was forty-one leaving Colorado for North Carolina, was earnestly ready to gallop over the rainbow bridge. 2022 was a year of big change when obedient compliance as I drove down I-70 East leaving Colorful Colorado forever behind me with no emotion escaping my face. In 2022 the adaptability to letting someone close only for them to sneer while they scrape you off the bottom of their shoe like a rubberized, chewed piece of Juicy Fruit.
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