Unworthy stitches

I am getting really tired of just moving along, getting pushed through the world, like so much excrement, just a necessary movement in life's digestive system. I miss hope.
I will keep trying and in between I will remember….
What my toes felt like in a roomful of wheat that I knew I was not supposed to enter, let alone stick my dirty ten year old feet in. The smell of grain, the dust particles sparkling in front of me, my hands buried in the golden mound. I am intoxicated by the sensations. I hear my father coming. I make my escape through the trap door, jumping to the bottom of the barn where the cattle were kept when the farm had livestock. It was dark with the water stalls still intact and an old grain box where litters of kittens were born. We had cats, sometimes twenty or more. They had a fragile existence and the many feline tragedies would be a precursor to my obsessive compulsive cat searching. There I would recreate bizarre orphanages and prisoner of war camps with Liddle Kiddles and Pee Wee dolls, cutting their hair up to the sewn heads. I made my little sister join me and tormented her with cruel stories of her adoption and the gypsies that abandoned her. We would swing from the top of the barn and beat our chest like Tarzan as we tried to land on straw and not farm implements. One day I missed and hit a collection of aluminum siding, cutting my ankle open. Bright red blood gushed forth as screams emitted from my mouth. My father assuredly not happy put me in the blue Chevy station wagon. I wailed and lamented the 10 minute ride to the hospital. They called my doctor and he trudged in with his fishing hat still on and a terse look on his face. My eyes red from crying and too scared to look up I plaintively yelped,
“I don’t want to die, even if I’m poor, please.”
My dad laughed a nervous laugh and apologized for me. The doctor seemed quiet and he assured me I wasn’t going to die, just get stitches.

I am still that little girl, a weed in the garden, the messy kid in catholic school the nuns didn’t like, the stupid one who failed driver’s education, the careless one who let the dog out, the crazy one who wasted everyone’s time. I keep trying to be normal, to understand what people are asking, to not frustrate and make them mad. It just makes me so sad.