Barbed Wire
The thing I miss most
about being a teenager
is sneaking out.
Not so much my early curfew
and the sense of confinement,
but the fact that my freedom
was only a stuffed bed,
a tip-toed escape,
and a fence-hop away.
My nostalgia leaves me searching
for that since-lost feeling
of running down a steep driveway —
every part of my body giddy and racing —
and slipping into a world without rules,
with the every-day clutter of thought
soon to be swept away by
the substance of the evening.
I’m in my twenties now and almost two months sober —
my longest stretch in over a decade —
and I no longer have any reason to
sneak out and into the night.
So instead I find myself
driving to nowhere for hours on end,
the commute from my 9-to-5
turning into daily road trips
across back-streets and up hillsides
to catch glimpses of the sun
as it falls behind the city.
All the while, music full volume,
windows down,
yelling to lyrics on loops
and going just a little too fast
just to feel that sense of momentum —
my search for escape
but I’m driving the same circles every day
because I still haven’t found the road out.
While the stillness of sobriety
is beginning to drown me
inside this empty house
after boarding the windows shut.
And these days the fences around me
aren’t so easy to jump.
And I can’t say I wasn’t warned
of the fact that
age comes with barbed wire
but I didn’t realize that I’d grow up to
become both the prisoner and the guard.
That I’d build a life for myself
without emergency exits
and that that wild and reckless teenager
would still be trapped inside —
racing between rooms,
trying to tear the boards from the windows
with nothing but bloody fingernails and frantic breath.
I’ve locked her in a cage
and tossed the key
to the bottom of a bottle
I can no longer touch.
And the last time I tried this,
it was only five weeks before I broke the glass,
set her free, let her slip into evenings
I’ll never remember,
adventures and mistakes
even she can’t remember,
time I’ll never get back,
days I wish I had back.
Because now that the mirage of my dream job
has faded to exhaustion and mistrust
and the grass still looks better
anywhere other than my
drought-plagued home state,
I’m using every waking moment
that I don’t spend driving and yelling
trying to fashion ladders
to find another way over these fences
built by my own hands.
But for tonight,
I’m hoping that the racing pace
of my stage fright
will remind that restless part of me
enough of that steep driveway to freedom
to quench her thirst —
if only just for now.
Written for an open mic in Berkeley, CA, in late October 2016
