Fifteen

I was fifteen, but that was only a number. Some part of me had existed forever, and another part had just been born. And that number only matters in the telling. Somewhere between existence and not. I'm still waiting for existence to happen.

I had just started to come into some semblance of life as a result of hard contact lenses, but having just barely begun. It was a period of existence, for real, and rare in that fact. Before certain atrocities, but after an untold number. I began to live, briefly, for a moment.

I met a boy who worked in a factory at night. He was 16. He was engaged and his fiance lived with him at his parent's home. I don't actually know the arrangement. I can say this for a fact - he gave me a goose egg that I have kept in a bronze incense burner since 1972.

Deep inside me, he ignited a fire that has since been extinguished. The light died at some point after the innards of that goose egg ceased to exist, and when the full realization of my nothingness sank in. It was a slow and tedious process, that realization. I try to deny it from time to time, but it finds me in quiet moments. You see, I was born, but not given life.

He called me from his factory job in the evenings. I stretched the telephone cord from the hallway into my room. We talked for an hour - it might have only been half that long - however long of a break he had. Most of those talks have been secreted away into a small section of my brain that holds the pleasantries. It's a small section and hard to access verbatim. But it never ages, just like the goose egg. Inside a wall of bronze.

He was kind to me, and that was a first.

We talked a lot, and the words meant something powerful. I thought it was love, and it might surely have been. But his story was already written. I knew it from the start. There were no delusions. For me and my existence in this lifetime, there was only hard reality, cold and black on all sides, with no room for anything else. I knew doom. It had succored me.

He said he would not be able to marry if he but saw my face again. I tried to make it so. I made myself a dress and took a pair of my mother's heels. I caught the bus on Independence Ave., thinking I might sneak beneath the veil into the church. When the bus stopped - I'm thinking Woodland - I made my way.

Click-clack, click-clack - my mother's heels blared away the closer I got. There were people milling about and they started to look in my direction. Yes, indeed " I was an alien from outer space in a homemade dress and stolen heels, heading in the direction of a most Catholic church. And alien I was, for only he had caused me to live. Prior to him, I was naught. A magnet for bullies, with an eye patch and a shock of orange frizz. An error.

Then, as now, there was only me. A malnourished embryo of cells, slowly dividing, into an epiphany of the insane from a hundred generations, unknown. Now I'm a loner, but then, there was only me. It wasn't my choice. I was born there.

Those milling people looked at me and knew I was out of step. They glared unwelcome into me and they hit their mark. Stupid was the only thing in the world I was not. Ugly, unwanted, upsetting, unsettling. Horrible in every little way. But I was not stupid. It was the only thing I had of value and it was real.

I turned and ran and the click-clacking made me deaf. To the sound of my heart, having beaten but briefly. To my brain saying I had a value, even if only to one. I heard for a moment because he made it so.  The deafness before and after. For a speck of time, I heard.

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I have a recurring dream. I'm running through an airport, sprinting as fast as I can in heels. Click-clacking on a hard cement surface. The airport is deserted - just me and those heels. It never ends, that airport. I can never make it to the gate. When I wake up, I'm exhausted. And that feeling is the highlight of my day.