The Fall of a Kite

When I was nineteen years old, I wrote a letter to the idea of a person. I thought I would give the letter to them if we ever met, if they ever existed. I was tired, I think, and I’m always more sentimental when I’m tired.
In the letter I felt compelled to tell this person about my earliest memory.

I was sitting on my dad’s lap in our old glider rocking chair, the one with the blue cushions all snagged and lumpy with age. I used to pick the little balls of lint absent-mindedly from the fabric. Dad was reading a book to me, an old vintage-looking book with pictures and names of animals—four per page against a forest-green background. At least, forest-green is the color of the page I remember; the other pages could have been different colors. He would say each animal’s name in a funny voice. For example: “pink flamingoooooooo” with a high-pitched lilt at the end of the drawn out sound. I don’t know how old I was; whatever age children are when they first start saying real words, words besides “mamma” and “dada”. That day, I pointed at the illustration of the long-necked pink bird and said, “Pink flamingooooo!”

I’ve never told anyone that before.
I was afraid no one would believe I actually remembered it.

I wrote about other early memories, too. A crystal bowl of oranges; scraping my face in a fall on my aunt’s steep driveway.

I remember a beach; I think it was in Seattle. It was too cold to swim, but I could taste salt anyway. Our bright Ninja Turtle kite stabbed neon green into the gray flesh of the sky, a diamond-shaped wound bleeding ribbons.

Months later that kite hung in our garage, covered in little baby spiders. I liked spiders back then; I don’t know what happened.

We threw the kite away eventually, and I mourned both deeply and briefly, as children do.

Strange how I can remember things from so long ago, yet yesterdays sometimes seem fragmented. These days my brain feels like a box with both ends open; things are put in just to drop out through the bottom. I deposited the information, but it isn’t there anymore. Recall is requested and I grasp desperately around my memory but so often I find only space, previously occupied.

I’m still waiting for someone to write my perfect song, an anthem for the people-pleasers and the not-enoughs; for we passionate, pining people, prone to both debilitating caution and mistakes. Those of us who feel the constant weight of debt, like we owe something to everyone. I guess the would-be writers are too busy desperately avoiding being burdensome, or maybe poring over their self-help books that they clutch like paperback bibles.

I’ve been busy too lately, in my brain. It’s been cold so I’ve been stuck between walls, and it’s cozy but I feel restless too. My thoughts have nothing to do but be popcorn in my skull, springing about with no rhyme or reason. I’ve been paralyzed by the random nature of their fleeting appearances.

I need to focus in that special way that I can only achieve on a horse. The popcorn settles, the urgencies fade, distracting excitement recedes and worry is forgotten. I am finally grounded, focused on the animal beneath me. On aligning our thoughts and movements until we are meshed; until we are no longer two shapes but one, no longer horse and woman but centaur. I haven’t ridden in over two weeks, and I miss my painted palfrey. It was nighttime when I sat astride him last. Darkness pressed up against us like a solid thing, broken here and there by a thin sheen of moonlight that drained the color from whatever it touched; the whole world in black and white. Together we were stars of the silver-screened night, for a little while.

And then it was just a memory, too; another kite to fly above the chilly beach where the past laps at the present shore.