I REMEMBER…

I remember playing in the backyard of my childhood home with my best friend. We found a dead squirrel and her Dad had to walk across the street to come pick it up with a shove. I don’t know what he did with it!

I remember crying on the floor of the playroom at my grandma’s house. The walls are lined with a textured pink wallpaper. My cousin is sitting on the bed, looking down at me. “Wah, wah! The baby is crying!” I remember feeling rage.

I remember sitting on a couch watching Titanic for the first time with my Dad in the “Green House”, the summer rental home he lived in while he rented out his own house. The living room was sunken in, like in those 60’s houses. The Titanic movie came on two separate VHS tapes.

I remember riding bikes with my Mom on the Hudson Rail Trail, behind the large parking lot and business plaza. The road was paved and scattered with multicolored leaves. There were wooden fences on each side to keep people on the trail.

I remember being alone in my bedroom, feeling big emotions, and kicking a hole in the white bedroom door after getting into an argument with my Mom.

I remember inviting all of my neighborhood friends over to my house after school while my mom was at work. I remember jumping on the netted trampoline out back. I remember one of my friends petting my dog in an inappropriate way and getting peed on.

I remember standing on the dark blue carpeted floor at the top of the stairs in my grandma’s house, feeling shame, embarrassment and betrayal because my Mom had just revealed my problems with constipation to everyone sitting in the living room.

I remember driving into Boston on the highway with my aunt, playing my emo music for her, and feeling like finally someone cared about the real me. I remember telling her things that I wasn’t comfortable talking to my parents about at the time.

I remember looking at photos of my younger cousin in her bright, rose-colored prom dress. She looked so beautiful, I couldn’t help but remember the photos of me in my royal blue prom dress almost fifteen years ago.

I remember doing yoga one afternoon in the upstairs bedroom at my Mom’s house, on top of my light grey yoga mat. I was doing goddess pose, I think, and suddenly felt a warm release of energy through my pelvis. I thought that I had opened a chakra.

I remember driving 4 hours by myself from Cape Cod through central Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont to attend a protest in Quebec, only to realize after passing through border patrol and driving over dirt roads in Canada that my cell phone service was not set up to be used out of the country, and because I could not use my GPS, I could not get to where I was going.

I remember standing in front of the sink in my mom’s bathoom, on the 2nd floor of my childhood home, mixing together different shampoos and soaps and makeup items to create a liquidy mass of something that resembled throw-up. I wanted to trick my Mom into thinking I was too sick to go to school that day.

I remember sleeping in my mom’s queen-sized bed, upstairs where the walls and floors were lined with hardwood, dreaming that I was very large, and then that I was very small. It kind of resembled the part of the movie Alice in Wonderland where she takes those magical pills and changes in size.