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it's six fifty-three. the world will begin in seven minutes.

[talk radio]

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Sometimes I just don't feel like living through whatever I'm living through at the moment. I get tired of the questions, the way I seem to circle them endlessly, instead of just ripping off my earrings and throwing the first punch.
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When this happens, I like to write like I'm old, like I'm through this stage, like the agitation and humiliation have faded into a really good story. I write like I'm sixty-two and telling the women I play pool with about what happened when I was in my early twenties, when I was kind of dumb, when I didn't understand that there was such a thing as grace, when I put too much faith in my ability to get up after falling down a flight of stairs.
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I pretend I'm leaning up against a counter in someone else's kitchen, the bones standing out in my hands like the outlines of trees in winter, blowing on my tea and laughing about the time I thought I would never be whole again. With my sisters, with the guy who does my taxes, with whoever needed to hear it, it doesn't matter. I just want to be telling it, not waking up to it.
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I want to have lived for decades, to know that things have an end just like they have a beginning, to be wise enough to remember none of us came into this world with a whole heart, that the best we can hope for is to leave with it healed. But we have to let those pieces go.
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But when I'm done, I'm always twenty-two again, unsure how these kinds of stories end.