A Lost Girl On the Road

Scintilla 3.14.13 prompt.

I chose the one where we describe an event as a set of instructions. I have written about much of what appears here in other forms, but as poet Jim Daniels said in a workshop last summer, “writers get obsessed and stay obsessed.”

A Lost Girl On the Road

1.      Have your first kiss on an abandoned runway of an airport never built because of a war. Make sure the night is moonless, yet contains stars.

2.      Let your lips linger over his. Taste the future.

3.      Feel the tectonic plates divide, swallow you whole.

4.      Lie across the front seat of his car. Run your fingers over his bare arms, breathe in the teenaged boy smell imprinted on his white T shirt.

5.      Take a snapshot of this moment. You will not be this happy again for a long time.

6.      Move away to the other side of the world shortly afterwards.

7.      Live in paradise, lost in a lonely ocean.

8.      Walk barefoot and watch men land on the moon

9.      Move to a rainy city in the Pacific Northwest and wear the wrong kind of clothes.

10.  Watch your mother die.

11.  Move to a college town in Ohio and lie to your new friends. Tell them your parents are divorced so you don’t have to say the words,“My mother is dead.”

12.  Read far too many books. Get drunk. Do drugs.

13.  Get a fake ID and go to college bars while still in high school. Date lots of young men who fail to fill the vast crater growing inside you.

14.  Eat. Never feel full. Stab yourself in the leg with a pen for no apparent reason. Leave a scar.

15.  Develop strange phobias: riding in cars, flying, driving.

16.  Move again.

17.  Start college. Drop out. Work a series of shitty jobs. Fall in love with shitty men.

18.  Restart college. Take it slow. Fourteen years. (While you work more shitty jobs.)

19.  Outgrow your phobias. Avoid shitty men. Get a cat. Get a real job.

20.  Forgive yourself.

Happy Writing.