Curse the River Styx

Bicycle: 

I often equate my true childhood to the blissful years I spent steeping in innocence and imagination in the square grid of a Texas Suburbia. Those years my siblings were my best friends. To me, my brother could’ve been a lasered eyed, cape wearer and my little sister, a conjoined twin. 

Our world wasn’t big. It was as far as we dare went, four houses down on either side of ours, and most days, it was never past the third cement square on our driveway. 

Inside, the piano bench could be the security check at the airport, and the stairs, a secret portal. We had Lego games beyond that of your wildest dreams, and I built planets on green grids and plastic bricks. 

Outside, the dirt and sticks could be magic potions. The streets could be a racetrack, and the puddle at the end of our old babysitter’s house, a ‘carwash’ for our bicycles. 

It was on those bicycles we first found our freedom. I loved the taste of it. It was wind in my hair, it was dreams lapping at my heels. 

But at eight years old, the world beyond the third square of my driveway was still a stranger. And by age ten, I still knew little beyond what lay four houses down on either side of 

my own. 

London:

London was a fever dream painted grey and blue and red, and I was a few calendar x’s away from twenty-one. It was my mother’s first time back since a record heatwave in the 80s, and to greet her return, the heatwave had come back for the first time in almost fifty years to offer its salutations. I, however, greeted it for the first time in my life.

For the year prior, I had been living, and I mean truly, and well, living. I found the first place I had ever had the honour to dub ‘home,’ and I thought you’d have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands. In fact, my mind had offered these exact graphic fantasies to refute the thought of anyone trying to take my newfound home from me.

But here I was, walking the streets of a foreign thrill, and I liked the taste. It tasted like dreams, and I was a starved woman. The joys of a small nowhere could never compare to the dazzle and high of a capital letter city like London, even if it did feel like home.

So down the streets of the King’s City I took a walk with my ambition, and it sent me running. 

Spider:

I had been eager; perhaps, a little too eager. This was not the first place I’d called my abode in this new city. When I said it’d be my last, I didn’t plan for the timeline to be such a short thread.

It was after midnight, though the sky hadn’t been in correspondence with the clocks. This far North, the best you could call it was dusk. Contentment and plans for an early night to bed warmed my bones like crackling tinder. This was what I had been fighting for. This was the rainbow after the storm. Except--- there was something off about my rainbow. It seemed to have beady eyes that bored into my soul and spindly legs meant to create, but here it was pulling apart my threads of sanity instead.

Every logical part of me, all the puzzle pieces of bravery and stability that I had fit together into a perfect picture, was but tissue paper in a hurricane. There, sobbing on the floor at 1 am, all my dignity and pride spilling out with the tears… I realised I wanted to go home. I had been so strong, I had carried all this weight by myself, but I was floored by something a fraction of my size. My vulnerability was on show, ripped open and dangling in the wind. This careful sense of belonging and strength that I had papier-mâché-ed into a mask was crumbling. These dreams I had bargained with the skies for were back to a sopping mess at my feet. Many would laugh at my undoing, but even a demigod like Achilles was fragile in the face of a quarter-sized flaw.

Perhaps, this invasion on my ceiling saw something in me I was not yet privy to. Maybe it took the reflection of my strangest weakness to make me realise that I didn’t want to face this on my own anymore. I had woven a web of dreams, but webs are only strong enough for a spider, not for a person. 

The Troubles:

The trouble with freedom is that there’s an edge to it. When I was young, I was rubber-necked, but respectful of the drop. Then I grew up and flirted with the edge, but never enough that it’d ask me to commit myself to the fall. But I grew too old and too tired of the fear, and, eventually, I fell head over heels right off the cliff. Now even the ropes thrown down feel like a hasty decision. 

The trouble with dreams is that they’re finicky. You wake up in a cold sweat or screaming at the ceiling. You wake up in a carcass of almosts with more fragments than answers.

And the trouble with ambition is that ambitions change. Attaching identity to goals doesn’t account for the people we have to become to survive the trek of the journey. And somewhere along the way, survival might take us down a fork to the sea with a map still leading to a mountain.