LatinosUSA

In the early morning I liked to get up before the sun and the other girls and shower and write for a while, have that first cup of coffee, walk out to see the train cars on the tracks at a standstill on the edge of this campus, and admire the colorful tags spray-painted on the containers. Sleep wasn’t really an option after the latest and greatest nightmare. I got to get right with my spirit. Put on my customary sweatshirt and long johns and jeans and faux leather jacket and knit hat and headed out. Lit a black label marlboro menthol and thought about the ocean and how these containers might look when stacked up on a ship … the whales circling the ships in remote and open waters. I was a daydreamer for sure. I got inside the heart of a latchkey kid who got right by fresh air and open spaces and blown curfews and ran like a deer, cans of spraypaint jostling in the pack, to get free from some complex family system shutting them down with their emotions churning inside. Where did they come from and where are they going? Vancouver and Seattle were just north of here, Puget Sound and the thickest fog you ever saw. My future was in there. I had no fucking idea where I would be or what I would be doing in thirty days time. It was equal parts thrilling and terrifying. The light started leaking into the sky. They kept you so busy all day long with the other girls in all these rooms on a perfectly ordered schedule with therapists and counselors trying to coach you up into your experience, strength and hope. I was still stuck in my hopeless jaded mind. But my heart was delicate, pumping the medications out to my extremities and into my head to keep me from going off something fierce. I wanted to protect it. I imagined wrapping it in denim and placing it on a bed of hay in one of these containers to be swept down the shoreline south and then west, unloaded and hauled by a semi across Oregon and Idaho to the Dakotas. Kept safe until I got out of this mess I got myself into. There was no telling if I would get out of it. I took slow drags and kicked at the wet grass until my boots were clean.

Fucking rehab. Again. I wanted to leave but I needed to stay. My life depended upon it. If this train starts moving right now, I thought, I’m gone! The sound of steel on steel rising into the air. The adrenaline. The quick consultation with the gods. Then racing with my wheezing smoky asthmatic lungs and skinny jean legs and jumping with all my might up on a landing between cars, nobody around to stop me, and sitting down cross-legged with an arm wrapped around a heavy metal handle, welded, watching the campus of perfect landscaping and buildings housing all the others who had come to the end of the line, like me, get smaller and smaller until it disappeared. I looked down at my boots wet with dew to make sure my laces were tied, then up at the colorful sky. I won’t be able to keep warm, though. With my luck I’ll probably catch cold and die of pneumonia.

Goodbye, dear friends. Now I am in motion, a new and steady rhythm … walking back to the solid brick dorm, my only home. My new and only friend Bonnie greets me at the door. Damn, she says, you weren’t kidding when you said you get up early. I couldn’t go back to sleep. I was having nightmares. Hey! There’s some pretty cool tags on that train. Wanna see?