Never Walked In High Heels

Reprinted with permission from A Jar Full of Fireflies by Ashley Brown.

I will tell you your story from my point of view. Though there were several decades in there where I missed it all and a few where I chose to. I will tell you your story, though you may not recognize it now through all the history books and blackboards. I will tell you your story though perhaps you have already seen it a better way ‘round. Way up there with all the wreckage and stars.
I found you when I was walking in the monsoon and stubbed my toe on your feet and gathered the courage to climb your branches. When I was young I climbed (and didn’t mind the callouses on my feet) to your hear your leaves shake and talk and shake back again when my face was close enough. I would watch your great trunk tremble and tell of all the bodies bent beneath you. lovers. hippies. the romans to hide their swords. and marys rounded bastard belly . Later, maybe because my mom was tired of my bruised knees or because we were running out of Band-Aids. My father climbed high into your branches holding boards and a rusty hammer and into your arms laid a room for us. and I would climb and read you where the wild things are and a wrinkle in time. fight battles from your boughs. And on Sundays I would sit to watch you talk to the sky. The way we would if we could hear its language. But then I started having to wear stockings and go somewhere else to learn things. and I gathered philosophy and politics and so many words in my arms I no room for holding your branches. now I am sorry it took me so long to unfold the map that led back to you. and am glad you didn’t mind the wait and said you didn’t understand time anyway, that yesterday you watched as the world was made.

Reprinted with permission from A Jar Full of Fireflies by Ashley Brown.

Dear crosswalker,

Every day that fall and just before the sun was up, I took the train from Cite Universitaire to the French school, coffee filter grit between my teeth and my metro pass clumsily shoved between my skirt and hip. And after school I wandered your city, watching the way high heeled women walk and how little french people’s mouths move when they talk. I sat for hours in front of the seine, the bread shops, and cathedrals watching the sun glint against the tourists and lovers. The business men and beggars.

That day I saw you, I watched the street sign turn from red to white and all those people pass you by. I watched your clean and open eyes pass right through them, figuring, for a moment you were daydreaming…But you were somewhere much farther away, unsuspecting. brave. lost. So I took you by the arm and we walked across the street, you and I and all those shifting clothes and feet. We were the perfect pair, you holding whispered conversations and words and cadences and i with my memories of colors and people and sun. Each disconnected, in our own way, in that endless city of streets and savants and silk.

We could have shared our secrets, been each others treasured maps, had they not been sealed up in a language I didn’t understand. But then again, I figure that of course you would not have known just where the sun was and if you did it would not have mattered. And I don’t care too much for gossip.

So instead, we shared a crosswalk. some sort of lovely and strange solidarity in all that silence and seconds, grabbing each others’ coat sleeves and pulling ourselves across.

I think you knew.

Just how I felt.

Reprinted with permission from A Jar Full of Fireflies, by Ashley Brown.

Dave is teaching high-schoolers in Virginia. Charles is finishing up his first year of medical school. Carter and Will are married almost a year now and talking a language I don’t understand. Lucy joined an artist co-op and is painting in her own studio now. Laurie is waiting tables in the North Davidson District.
Some of my friends chose to stay. To Teach. Work. Drink. Commit themselves to graduate school or the World Cup. Some of my friends chose to go away. To Travel. Relearn languages. Ride in trains. I sporadically read their postings about protests in Dublin and humanitarian aid in South Africa.
I measure my life by these people.
I am turning twenty something. Deferring my college loans. Learning to cook. Refusing to live at home. Paying bills by myself. Planting a garden. Finding unfamiliar communities and new friends. Julie calls and tells me she got a job working at Bank of America. I call Laurie and tell her it’s not really about the boyfriends or the benjamins. This backfires because I, as it turns out, am not humorous or entitled to this joke, and because it has everything to do with both. I am writing new songs and spending time in a newfound, bohemian coffeehouse. I’m wondering if I lost weight since last year and about the new changes my parents made to the house.
Strange, scattered feeling when you realize your home is made of people. Vulnerable feeling… and that these particular people, come and visit, but that they are visiting. Awkwardly asking where the bathroom is instead of stealing your leftovers.
This realization makes your home smaller. Because maps full of pen marks and scotch tape still fit in your pocket. (You shouldn’t have to use these kind of things to find your home.) And it makes your home bigger. This too. You stretch out your index finger and point in the direction you last saw them go. (But they’ve gone farther than your borderline fingertips or vanishing point, primary school perspective.)
“Learn how to use a compass,” I tell myself, “and hope map keys lie about all that distance in-between and make the decision to believe that, maybe, the latitude line mathematics and geological dots we call home will turn into people soon, and we will hold each other by unfolding our maps.”