Kid

It’s fall and maybe I can breathe deep now. Maybe I can feel the sun shine, maybe I can let it cut me and stuff me.

Maybe I can leave my car windows down, and park in some cul-de-sac, and let the leaves float down to my floorboards. Let them stack and flood, up to my ankles, and then my nose, every breath and pulse sending a crinkle through the chassis as each leaf shifts and breaks, because they’re dead and dry and they rip and tear every time I blink. But maybe, maybe I could sit real still. And years could pass. And summers and springs would come, but the autumns would stack up, and the leaves would too, and the winters would stick the leaves to one another until me and my car just disappeared, not in a poof or puff but because we had become nothing but leaves. And because the pile was so big and maybe it ate me, no one would go near it to clean it and no wind would blow it away. Then they’d forget about me, cause I’m nothing but a pile, and brand new babies would stare at me from cold windows and wonder what I was. Until those babies went to school and became kids, and as soon as the bell rang, they ran to their bus and home just to fall right into me. If you saw it from space, it’d look like an explosion, this big giant ball of flame, with reds and yellows and oranges flying from me like embers, and all the kids landing like big, laughing bombs, over and over again.

But then these kids would stop running home, and then they would start to worry, and then they wouldn’t jump in anymore. Cause who are they, to think of leaves? They gotta take on the world. They gotta question and fight and challenge the universe, because if they don’t, who else will? Maybe one of these kids will start a band, and he’ll sing a song about a girl that broke his heart. His friend has a camera, and he wants to make a music video for the song about the girl, and he’s got a vision, but he’s worried. But he’ll record, and he’ll get all the neighborhood kids to jump in me again, only now it means something, it’s a metaphor, it’s an analog, it’s a fantastic consideration of color theory…

And me, this big ‘ole pile, how could I get hurt?

After all, I wasn’t always this big pile of leaves. I was a kid too. And I would question and fight and pain because I was never where I wanted to be. I sang songs about girls that broke my heart. I made videos of piles. I wrote because it helped when I was a kid, and I would worry even then because I didn’t know how not to.

So every new fall is a chance to try. So I’ll breathe real deep, and I’ll let the sun shine, and maybe this time it will cut me and maybe this time it will stuff me.