Shayla Raleigh

Ode To Many Newly Named Stones

     I sit in a room full of those I hold the same blood as and be as inconsequential as the fog that drifts of the lake where I caught my first fish--my first ounce of praise. In this room there are many thoughts. Each conflicting with those around them. Separable by the slides that generated to em the people I call my parents. As I look from one side to the next, the room will reshape, separating into the side that gifted to me the man that will someday be called my father, marked on the stone where they will lay my aching bones. In this new room the inconsequential fog will sink, align itself with what is becoming the pews of the church where I learned my first hymns, met the first woman that brought to me the idealism of wrongness being subjected purely by what we have been taught.

     In this room of the religion that will make a mockery of the child, I see when I look in the reflective glass of the offering bowl it is where I take my first true breath. The first place that I will lay a stone in the symbolism of the path that leads to where I am now, in the mind that allows me to see back into these rooms. It is from here that I see the room dissolve, the bedroom that is stayed in every summer of my time until the first one where I speculated I would surely outgrow the memories. It is here I lay three more stones.

     The first I lie for the years spent in the floor of the second house that raised me, this stone I lay for the girl that discovered her loves for never halting in the seek for answers to the old westerns, to the true crime streamed in that floor. The second stone I lie with the same hopes of the people that belonged to that house, in what feels like years of a journey away, buried in the sand with the shipwreck in the sands of the placeholder I have come to attribute to my love of discovery. It is to that water, the blue pulse of the cold sea off that shore, that I will attribute to my fear of being forgotten.

     The third and final stone of myself that I will lay at the feet of the family of my father--perhaps the newest of them all, I lay the stone of forgiveness. A mercy they have extended to me in every waking mistake I have made, that I now extend back for the good and the bad, for every hazed memory of fish, sand, Christmas spent in the same browned carpet. A dreamland acceptance of every refusal to be forgotten born out of the many hands that taught me how to walk when the world itself tried to shake me off.

     To the hands that raised my mother, I owe many of the winding paths, the hollowed forests and the burnt down concrete jungles that have allowed the formation of my mind, too many that built the wall of my bones. As the drift that I am shapes anew to take on the formation of the pink walls, the dog-eared coloring books, and the endless patter of dog paw, it is here that I focus on the girl who sits on the steps. I could implore her many a question about the stone that will forever hold a piece of me, covered as it is now, yet it is here I lay the stone that taught me the value of the quiet undissmissable presence of another. Looking out to that field, though enclosed now as it may be, will surface unto me the circus of sights and sounds, firefly nights and yelling children. It is watching that girl that I owe the fearlessness I have grown.

     As the rain of clarity begins to fall, I will drift back to that room, the one that left in my thoughts the hypothesis that in a room full of these I could be inconsequential--an idealism I owe to none other than my own selfishness, the fault of the human nature I possess purely for my own thought. As each of the stones I have named for the first time in this neverland that consumes my waking hours, I find a realization. The fog that I believed myself to be has begun to solidify, until the bones, the thoughts, and the characteristics I have granted to the world around me will connect. In a room of inconsequence, it is here that I will accept the shape of myself, in remembrance that it is not the thoughtlessness of those that amde me that has left me see-through, but my own desire to hide myself for fear of human thought. It is in this rejection of them that I have become clear, and it is now, holding the stones of myself, the first I feel I have told the story of me.