Numb

It happened when she was very young. He spent an afternoon in the shed with a hammer and nails and two long two by fours he’d traded a litter of pups for. Then later that day when the earth’s turning had erased the face of the sun, but broad swatches of color still lay across the sky burning through the haze, he dragged the two by fours up the hill behind their house. He chose a spot amid a collection of skeletal sage brush. Crows wheeled overhead, silent, and watched him lift the heavy headed iron shovel and plunge it repeatedly into the ground. After a while he stopped and wiped the sweat off his brow with a bare arm, breathing hard. He stared with an expression of longing mixed with hatred at the hole he had made. Sweat dripped off his body into the silent gaping hole. The air was utterly still, laying between earth and space like furniture in an attic, collecting dust. He took a deep breath and let it out in angry exaltation, tossing the shovel off to the side. He dragged the two by fours over to the hole and paused above the raw upturned face of the earth. “Now look!” he said, looking pained. “This is how it’s going to be.” Then he drove the end of one of the two by fours into the hole with all the force he could muster. The crows looked away embarrassed by the look on his face. He filled the hole back in with the used and wasted earth then he stepped back and beheld what he had done. The cross looked down on the barren valley where, on other hill tops crosses stood, turning blind faces to the world.

Past

The rain spills down the window pane. The house across the street is shrouded in thick, white fog. The silence is broken momentarily by the soft clinking sound of a wind chime. I can’t see it but the soft, matte tinkling noises make me picture forks and knives and wire whisks dangling from the neighbor’s porch beam, swaying and dripping in the mist.
It has only been a month since I moved out of my parents’ house. I move forward from moment to moment with a momentary purpose that blots out the light of the past. I am aware very acutely that the past has not relinquished its hold on me. It sits behind my eyes and my heart like water behind a dam, huge and deep and powerful. I know I need this past from years of trying to leave it behind. I am not afraid of needing it or having it on my own terms. I am afraid of what it needs from me and I am afraid of not being able to say no to its demands. That I don’t know what its demands are only makes my dread worse.
I look down at the chemistry book in my lap at my future. I feel instinctively that if I create a future that is bigger and more powerful than my past then I can face where I’ve come from without fear. If I just move forward long enough, deny the past long enough to build a fortress out of the future then the past won’t be able to hurt me anymore. Something tells me that this amounts to hubris, that stories don’t work that way, that the two sides of the equation don’t equal out. Something tells me that the demands of the past must be met. But, I tell myself in answer to this, there is nothing that limits me to how this can be done. And I am determined to do it on my own terms or not at all.