I want my childhood back. I want to feel safe. To disappear inside a book or TV show and not worry over the state of the country or the world and its reckless abandon.
I want a leader who doesn’t create chaos to keep the masses confused and unnerved. I want a leader who doesn’t position himself as my abuser—claiming he’s the only one who can comfort me after he’s beaten me unmercifully. I want to remember why I came here, why my soul before birth entered into this contract. Remember who I was before the veil lifted and the world showed me its ugliness. I want the veil back, the guise of safety and protection. I want to remember so I can leave. Or simply take me back and leave me.
Mommy, will you let me lay my head on your cushioned lap, fall asleep to your humming, and the sweet, faint smell of Jergen’s lotion? Can I stay there? Will you sew me another frilly dress that I hate? Make me stand on a chair while you check the hem? How many weekend afternoons I spent spinning slowly on a chair as you to adjusted the hem while sticking me with pins. I’d give anything to be your pincushion again. Give anything for comfort and safety in a world that is anything but. Daddy, can we drive to Weirs Beach on a hot summer day? Bring the old yellow cooler packed with egg salad sandwiches, the towels, my sand pail, shovel, and sifting screen. Daddy, bring me into the water, lift me above your head, then throw me in! After we can walk across the street and go down the water slide; go in the Penny Arcade and play Pac-Man! Or Riverside Park, let's go to Riverside Park! Take me on the log ride, Daddy.
I want to go back. Back to when I sliced skin off my forefinger with a vegetable peeler in the kitchen of Natick’s Jehovah’s Witness assembly hall. I just want the time back—the carefree, unworried thoughts of a child who’s looking forward to a perfect, beautiful world. I want to be little Me again, trying desperately to keep up with Dad’s harried pace down the wide, carpeted hallway. It’s a faded cerulean blue, walked on by God himself. Dad flings me toward the on-site nurse. “Fix her finger. She she thought it was a carrot.”
Bring me back to the courtyard of Natick’s assembly hall, in the budding springtime, when the trees and bushes sang sweet songs of awakening—bursting with fragrance and lovely pastels. Bring me inside, leave me at the baptismal pool, inhaling the chlorine and ogling the mountainous painting above the pool. Then take me to the cafeteria, sit me down on a small, circular seat—you know, the ones that alternate colors of the 70s: orange, yellow, and brown. Plop me down on the orange one with Lemon-Lime Shasta, a squishy, pre-made ham sandwich, and a chocolate pudding purchased with meal tickets. Can we go back?
Back to the orchestrated symphony of rice paper in bibles rustling, rushing to scripture, sprinting toward prose in verses. I want to nestle in the safety of those pages, wrap myself in thin paper and live among the poetry of Psalms, the wisdom of Proverbs. I don’t recognize myself here, living among the doom of Revelations, slipping through the pages of ruin and devastation only to keep falling. I look for the harlot on her seven-headed beast, but I don’t see her. I see nothing but red. I’m helpless. Hopeless. Tired. Weary. Broken. Alone. Tell me again of King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream—the statue of fallen kingdoms and those soon to crumble. Seven world powers and the two left standing shall tumble. Tuck me into the nook of his muscled and bulging crossed arms. I need protection, strength, certainty. I’m no good on my own.
I am not a problem to be solved. I’m simply not okay.
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