If I Had a Bell

Spring break came and went as did a throw down confrontation with a friend of mind, which I did not initiate or really understand. Anger makes me dumb- intellectually, emotionally, and literally in a verbal sense. I turn off and find it hard to decipher anything through that veil of fire and malice.

Moving on after that has been difficult, but wouldn't you know- things feel exciting and joyous today. They always do eventually. In that spirit, and after listening to several Peter Paul and Mary songs, I have come up with this. I'm not sure I think it well polished or anything, but it is here, alive and breathing, and I present it to you as a product of the young and naive springtime...

When I was little I thought a lot about my legs. They ached a lot. I have a theory that this was because my childhood bed was too short for me. But it was cute and hand painted, so it stayed a long with all the other items in my mother's house that were functional only in that they looked right to her. Little girls have little girl beds with tulips stenciled on them. A place for everything- and her only daughter in her place.

Anyway, I used to think about my legs in the summer time when my knees were perpetually bloody and skinned. I thought about them when they got sunburned in mid day July, and when they picked up grass clippings in sweaty sticky August. I used to imagine that they were strong and invincible- these appendages of bone and muscle that held me upright. At one point I read a phrase in a book that stuck with me- strong sturdy legs. This was perhaps from my early childhood experience with the little girl horse-book genre that included Black Beauty and Misty of Chincoteague, but I had translated it easily into human description.

My package of childhood eccentricities back then included a running inner monologue in which I narrated my own life. In times of stress, pain, or crisis, this urge kicked in to include moments of narration that did not even apply to my own situation. I would be sitting on the stairs, listening to my mother yell at my brother in the kitchen next door and suddenly the phrase “What a lovely day, she thought, as she walked along the path,” would pop into my head. When times got especially tough, I would narrate my own simultaneously occuring attempts to name all the presidents from Reagan backwards. Because I was only six or seven at the time, this never really went anywhere. I was spotty after Carter and usually landed at Nixon and Kennedy. From there it was a long dry desert to Lincoln, which led directly to Washington. She thought as she sat in a chair facing the corner of the room. What a lovely wood paneled wall this is.

What sturdy legs she had. What a pair of strong sturdy legs. This was a narrative trope in my head that became nearly as popular as walking along that damned path- wherever it was supposed to be. I used to think this at night particularly when my legs ached and I was up late, standing in my nightshirt with curlers to form my hair into marginally functional and unnecessary ringlets that got me picked on at school, begging for a glass of water from a parent I had awoken. I used to want my legs, in those moments, to feel tired, like I wanted the rest of me to feel tired. I wanted my legs to feel sore in a labor intensive sense- sore like someone who had been lifting things all day, or better yet, someone who had walked for miles and miles, straight to the horizon line and around.

Having grown up now, I have stopped narrating my life so much in my own head. I write more now, which is less eccentric, but the core activity has changed little, especially since I write to extract thoughts from my head that are buzzing around sometimes pleasantly by almost always noisily.

While my legs get fewer aches and skin abrasions, I have more adult injuries to them. I pulled a muscle once helping a friend move, and gave myself shin splints two summers ago during the time I flirted with becoming a runner. This flirtation culminated in a 5k run for me and the purchase of a t shirt with a fat penguin on it in a sweatband who was floundering his way down some nature path. Yes, a damn path.

It was also around this time that I realized I did not have strong sturdy legs, and that the activities that could potentially provide me with proof that I did have those kind of legs- like long thoroughbred racing legs, involved sweating, lungs aflame, and joints shooting with pain of constant impact with pavement. In short, I finally realized that this was an odd quality to ascribe to a human being and indeed better suited horses or other beasts of burden. I began to wonder where I ever got the decidedly odd turn of phrase to begin with and when I decided to remove it from its probably animal related context and adopt it into my own version of my self.

The idea of sturdy legs held a certain romance for me precisely because of what it suggested in a fantastic and metaphoric sense. It suggested that I perhaps was some kind of horsewoman hybrid, a woman with wild hair who was strong, untamable, and thus impervious. Someone who forged ahead regardless of anything because she was resolute and because she could. Someone with strong sturdy legs, like a horse, knows that they can indeed run or walk or continue to stand upright for hours and hours and miles and miles and trust that they need not fear physical fatigue, or in a more abstract sense, the fatigue that threatens when you cannot find it in yourself to love or keep believing anymore.

It is at this point that I find myself often these days. This point upon a knife edge when I feel afraid that the protaganist- me- will give up and won't make it to the end. I want to trust to myself to keep moving and going. Someone with sturdy legs keeps going even when she is blind and does not know the way, even when she is tired, she keeps intact the assumption that she that will never stop standing or moving. It is at this point that I want her- me- the main character- to hold into the faith that the answer is somewhere in front of her, that she will find laughter and joy again if she just promises not to lay down.

In the end, I am struck by a certain sense of irony that my monologuing about my sturdy horse legs occurred mostly at night when I was unable to sleep, begging my parents for water and keeping them from bed when what I really wanted was to not have to sleep in a dark room off the attic by myself in a bed that felt like a coffin. Tulips or no, it was still small and smelled of pine.

I did not want to lay down then, as I do not now- in stories or in life.