QUESTIONS I ASK MYSELF

(Another in a series about my childhood.)
* * *
I flee and leave my past behind me. Where I go I do not know. But this is so: No one can find me. My flight into the all-consuming night leaves no light to trail me by. What am I? Why am I? Who am I? Will I ever know?

I am confused, Was I battered and abused? Is my memory playing tricks on me? Will it ever set me free? Just let me be? When I did not mind my mom and she caught me all alone doing things I shouldn't do I wished she was dead. Then I told myself that wasn't true. "I love you, momma. Honest I do." She'd stroke my hair. "Of course you do. All sonnyboys love their moms. That's what they're supposed to do."

I am grown but still the little boy I was that day. A little boy grown tall who cannot cry. A youth who never learned to play, The same old fool I used to be. A clone of the younger me,

In my years of budding puberty, in moments of despair, when crisis crowded in on me and demanded I decide, I'd crowd into a shell where only I could dwell and in this shell I'd hide.

My awake world is a dream world of unreality. My dream world is starkly real to me. Dreams I alone create leave no guilt in their wake. They do not break the waking heart. They fade as beds of night are made.

I have no place to call my home. My presence where chance finds me. Dreaming of a long lost yesterday, filled with sorrow, I stumble aimlessly into tomorrow.