#79 – BILLOWING

The trees were billowing up and out and leaning over the road. Billowing. Had I ever noticed this before? It was like when I was 14 and looking out the window from our school library out down a hill and over an old river and over woods leading to a village and the hills that eventually would become the White Mountains. Looking out in early spring and seeing there was a red tint to the branches. Had anyone ever seen that before in spring? And had anyone ever noticed that trees billow in summer?

And had anyone ever been young and happy here? I had. Or lost here? I had. Or looking for god here, or saying there was no god here? I had. Here in northern New England, but not Vermont.

And the fears. Unspoken, mostly, the fears. that I would never grow a normal size penis. The no one would ever see that I was smart. That something, someone, would come at me in the dark, and I could not speak of it. Does anyone know? No one saw. Did anyone know?

Looking and looking and looking, as if all I had to do now was to find out who did what to whom. And maybe that was all I needed. I needed to get the story right. Not the form. The story. Revenge.

And acts or words of kindness. That clichéd line my mother-in-law wrote: "Thank you for being you." I called her Inay, the Tagolog word for Mom.

Acts of kindness and caring. And way back I had felt myself such a miserable little worm. And I had other aspirations of something else.

Then the deep, deep sadness And the anger. People who would get me if I did not get them first. And also, women I thought I loved.

And it wells up again in this mourning time.