Turbulence

This is more of a ranty, confusing piece of random than anything else....

I was reborn in a storm— power out, phone lines tied; the weather too shitty to step outside for much needed air but this house had a roof so it was alright. They had a great survival pack for this type of thing: cans of beans, a bottle of wine and matches—many little matches that lit many little candles around the house that cast many little shadows on the family photos that lined the walls. My father said to her, “you know, honey, we’re running out of time.” So she sat on the floor and she spread her legs and she pushed for a minute until I finally gave in and came back to her.
For a second she thought they’d soon get the power back in their empty house. When I was reintroduced to this world, she says that I illuminated the living room for a moment— bringing an instant of light to the darkest corners of what was once a mortuary. They are the ones who chose to stay in the house where they once prepared their dead, not me. So I collapsed under the phantoms they insisted on avoiding— that I saw in their faces, shrouding me like loose skin until I was nothing more than their writhing baby on a hardwood floor. A baby with arthritis and crow’s feet.
But I learned how to crawl and I learned how to walk and I even now know what it means to run— even if only in the dark, down the hallways of my home. But out there— in a world where everyone else is chained to some greater good or their self-induced bad—that is where I insist to be chained to everything. Give me all the scriptures of the world and I’ll pick a few and scrapbook a mantra. Hand me a single dollar bill and give me a dare—I promise I can do more evil without even spending it than you think I can. Outside of that house, the haven from the storm, the midwife’s reluctant office, the place I once grew up— where they once put makeup on stone faces and still sleep in caskets, just in case—outside is where I run much too fast.