A List of Cages

by Robin Roe

Because when you’re between two shores and no one can see you, you don’t really exist at all.

If I really had powers, I could turn off pain the way I can shut my eyes. But I can’t. I feel it. Skin doesn’t get thicker. Instead, it remembers. I know this is true, because the second the air touches my back, it starts to sting like the switch is already falling.

This part is hardest. A billion years of evolution tells your cells to run. But you can’t run. You have to turn around and face the desert wall. You have to be still. He doesn’t care if you cry, but you can’t fight.

It’s strange how many ways there are to miss someone. You miss the things they did and who they were, but you also miss who you were to them. The way everything you said and did was beautiful or entertaining or important. How much you mattered.

When you know you’re going to tell someone everything, you see your day through your eyes and theirs, as if they’re living it alongside you. But when you don’t, it isn’t only not seeing double—it’s not seeing at all. Because if they aren’t there, you aren’t either.

She always wore dresses, and she was pretty like an angel or someone’s mother.

Monday is like all Mondays. Like I’m sitting at the bottom of a pool, listening underwater to people living up above.

I walk the perimeter of the fence, and try to summon what I used to feel back when I thought I could bend time and spoons. I touch the red grains in the wood. I have a vague memory of doing that.

My mother once said that the planet was like an enormous womb, and every single one of us was a fetus. Death was nothing to be afraid of. It was just birth to another world, and someone would be waiting for us there. Sometimes I try to see this, my mother and father as two newborns holding hands and ejected into this other world. There they are just beginning.

Hate ricochets, but kindness does too.

Their eyes like safety nets, I can’t fall.

I want my body to be mine again.

You don’t really know people when your back is turned.

But whenever I would imagine leaving, I’d see the blue sky like the ocean—no walls or shore or end in sight. And I’d see myself disappear.

I should be afraid, but I feel empty. I remember my father’s hands. My mother’s hands. What hands are meant to do.

It’s like we’re back inside the center of the labyrinth and I’m struck with so much regret and so much love, it’s worse than a heart attack.

“And when you smile…my grandmother calls them big-soul smiles. She says some people have souls so big that they spread out, touching everyone they pass.”

There was nowhere to go that me and the pain didn’t follow.