Forests

There is still a voice that remains as an echo from my childhood and I hear it every now and then and

it reminds me of a time when everything was as it is now but unspoken

A time when I was not yet poisoned by the cancer that had taken root deep inside my being and

coiled it's long tendrils around my veins like the vines of some ancient malicious plant that is just
trying to survive but in order to do so it must suck the life from great living things and force them to
crumble and become compost so that new great things can grow and be strangled and become compost 

We call this process life

And we are all vines

And we are all great living things

And the voices from our pasts will never leave us as we grow and continue to try to survive 

We will remember the wooden floorboards and how they smelled of fresh stain when we endured

our first instance of cruelty and we will remember how beautiful the sun shone down on us when we

were first abused and we will remember the cologne and the perfume and how our finger nails felt like

they would fall out like leaves from a tree that was experiencing the encroachment of malicious vines 

And we are that tree

To be chopped down to provide shelter and warmth for other people and our ashes to be thrown away

and discarded like we were never living beings who sacrificed for the existence of others

And we are vines wrapping around other living things and sucking the life out of them as an act of

desperation so that maybe our ashes wouldn't be discarded and we wouldn't be forgotten but in the

end all things die

So we learn to live with those voices and we learn to cope with the blood stains on the carpets of our

mind because we are human and we fight to try to stay alive we try to fight to stay sane and stay sober

and sometimes we lose that fight and sometimes we break down and cry and sometimes needles

and burnt spoons are the only things that make us feel alive

No soul is perfect no soul is pure 

We do what we can in this vast empty space left in our skulls that was crafted by our abusers so they

could sleep in our heads and pop out at the most inconvenient of times 

We try to forge something new out of the old 

Something positive from the negative

We chop down our vines and force their stranglehold into the darkness so that we can continue to

grow closer to the sun in the sky that will one day consume our solar system but today gives us life

We find other great living things and form forests of people to keep the vines at bay

And sometimes those forests are littered with blades and condoms and other times the forest floor is

a sea of beer bottles and cheap liquor but at the end of the day we are all standing strong together to

work past the finger shaped bruises on our souls and excel beyond the hot breath of hatred on our

necks

Every single tree will eventually fall and become food for the worms and fungus that rise up from

our needles and condoms and bottles and books and every single tree will wilt and shed all its leaves

at some point

Failure isn't the end

It is only a stop along our path to coping 

Maybe one day we can see the sun without remembering the smell of alcohol on the breath of our

abusers

For today 

I'm just happy to be alive

Ego

"Ego"

By

AP Hadley

A line formed by friends and family stretches the depths of the hollow hills
And I am swallowed by the immensity of the event and the unbelievable enormity of the field in which we had all chosen to gather to cherish the last breath taken by a fellow human and send her off only for me to see her again in fifty years when the tar in my lungs would take hold and form a clump of cells that would slowly suck the life from my eyes and make my movements slower

In those final days they would say I grew sweeter and easier to be around after years of being angry and hardened by the rain and soot that poured from every orifice of every non-living thing I encountered, and after months of mild contemplation of the idea that I too would be a non-living thing that would exist only to pour rain and soot on the people who loved me and make them hard and make them angry, I would decide to treat them better

Only then would I grow sweet and easy to be around, only after my sole child was a full grown adult with a family of their own and the words “I hate you” had fallen from their lips would I realize the precious gift that I had received, not from some god or some intangible being but from the person I loved and spurned and yelled at when they accidentally burned me with a tea kettle during a long forgotten holiday party

My final breath would be strained and I would drown in my bed with my spurned lover and child who hates me at my side crying because these past few weeks they were able to tolerate me for the first time in a decade and honestly I wouldn’t want to go any other kind of way because the idea of dying alone is even scarier than dying next to people who you have hurt because in the end they too realized that dying alone would be a cruel way to go and they would be able to reconcile my past aggressions for the sake of my own comfort

My eyes would become milky sea glass after I finished convulsing and the nurse would give my family a few minutes to mourn me and say goodbye and although I would not hear them the idea is a nice one that would give them comfort as my skin ran cold and my heart stopped beating and the electrical impulses in my brain would slowly come to a halt and everything that is me would cease
But this wouldn’t be for another fifty years

Right now I am the fifth person in line to see the husk that her spirit called home and I’m getting nervous because I don’t want anybody to see me cry, crying would make me look weak and I need to be strong and I am strong but not strong like steel beams supporting a modern framework but strong like the hard wood foundation of a colonial house that has been rebuilt and burned to the ground more times than anybody cares to remember strong like an ancient fossil that has only become harder but more fragile with time

My voice would tremble as a single goodbye hung in the air, a poison cloud rotting away at the false sense of hope generated by this meeting and I would half expect the corpse in her new bed to look up at me and say something like It’s okay or I Love you but instead she lies there, still, unbreathing, like I would be in 50 years, and an uneasiness is washing over me


A hand on my back makes me realize the million year long vortex I’ve been trapped in was just my own head having trouble coping with the sobering reality that the person I loved would never utter another word and her heart would never beat the hand on my shoulder belongs to another person who loved her, another person caught in that awful spiral that your head generates and I hug him, saying it’ll be okay, even though we both know that is a lie, the words provide a sad sense of comfort to the moment

I still have to fall in love again and raise a child and become hardened from my inability to share my feelings so that I can pour my life into my work and slowly rot away all that I ever was in an attempt to achieve something and I still have to hold parties and drink beer and act normal even though nothing will ever be the same and I still have to be burned by that tea kettle and raise my voice and I still have to be hated and hard to deal with but those days are ahead of me

And honestly? Fifty years isn’t that long

One

"One"
By
AP Hadley

train tracks twist through treacherous tight tunnels 

Atop them a single engine pulling a single car

The conductor, a man with no aspirations and an addiction to his prescription, stares lazily at the hazy cool light emitting from the horizon

20 years of complex thought and formal education claw at the back of the man's mind but only images of suits and scoreboards reach the forefront of his thought

A cold cup of coffee that will never be consumed sits before the man

The brew is a special one from the heart of Columbia

The beans were plucked from the earth by the hands of a worker who will never own a television set because he saved his measly earnings to buy a pair of imported Nike sneakers in a vain attempt to impress a local girl he has loved since he was 11 years old

What he doesn't know is that her heart belongs to a gentle older woman born to honest people with a heart of gold

Their love ever a secret

So he continues to pluck coffee beans that get brewed and stored in cups only to go cold and never be consumed

And the conductor continues to flip his switches and pull his levers as he has done countless times on countless occasions 

The job so menial he no longer pays attention to the surrounding landscape or the passing cars

Or the moose in the field on the right

that would die a year later when a semi driver would plow into it after taking the 4th energy pill of his night

Trying to get his shipment of gaming systems to the store in time for the holiday deal 

he violated company policy and pulled an all-nighter

When his truck would slam into the moose, a chunk of antler would get lodged in his upper torso and he would require emergency surgery

Luckily the driver would survive and the experience would lead him to find Jesus and start going back to church where he would meet his beautiful wife who would die of leukemia a mere 6 years later

He would find the end of his own life on the edge of the office building he worked at after retiring from trucking

Only one person would attend his funeral

But the conductor didn't see the moose and he would never know about the trucker or the accident or Jesus

Ever did his train go on, never veering off the tracks

After several hours the destination was reached and the conductor signed the manifest stating his single car pulled by his single engine had made it

The woman at the counter would smile at the conductor and he would think how pretty she was

When she had been born the name given to her was Adam and her blanket was blue

Throughout her childhood she would be forced to swing bats and wear shoulder pads

Her first suicide attempt was at the age of 13 when she told her friend Mike that she didn't feel like a boy and he called her a word that was 6 letters too long

The stress and anxiety lead her to a rope tied around a ceiling fan dotted with sports stickers

her mother was home and heard her struggling 

Her mother would never understand but she was still sent to a mental health facility to cope with the depression

7 years of counseling, therapy, monthly shots and an unsupportive family later she would try again using the exhaust from her car 

Her partner, a gentle guy from the city that she had met in a college class about economics, would come home and find her passed out but still breathing 

He would hold her crying and begging for her to wake up

When she would come to, she would see his hard cheeks lined with tears, and she would note the relief in his eyes and he would kiss her, holding her tighter, sobbing

They got married last month and are going through the adoption process

The conductor smiled at the pretty girl and headed out to his cookie cutter home, ready to do it all again tomorrow