I see it. A diamond, maybe, or one of those long-tailed dragons that would have eaten the wind. And I feel the old, familiar tautness in my chest, the string pulling against a sky that was never offered. I begged. I know I did. But the word “begged” implies a transaction, a resistance, a no that is a solid thing you can push against. My asking was more like a low, constant hum. A frequency. I would stand in the doorway of the garage while my father organized his tools; tools that had specific names and specific homes, tools that were treated with the reverence of icons---and I would say, “Can I have a kite?” He would not look up. The hum would continue. “A kite.” The clink of a wrench, the slide of a screwdriver into its felt-lined slot. “How can I make one?” There was never a “no.” A “no” would have been a thing, a solid object I could have held, examined, and understood. What I received was the absence of a yes. A void where an answer should have been. It’s a subtle thing, that void. You grow up thinking it’s the natural state of the atmosphere.
And then six years---six years, which is a geological era when you’re measuring it in the half-life of a hope---simply eroded. It was the entire syllabus of my existence, from the first lesson to the final, unceremonious exam. And the final exam was moving. A truck. Boxes. The sudden, shocking agency of adults who had been, until that point, statues. And I remember standing on the carpet floor of the living room---the one I’d spent so many afternoons lying on, tracing the grainy fiber with my fingernail---and thinking, "Ah. This is what it was all for. This moment of departure. This is the climax." It’s laughable now. The profound anti-climax. The move itself is a dry fact, a period at the end of a long, pointless sentence that should’ve been chapters full of running and shouting and the particular exhaustion that comes from a day spent being a child. The move was simply a change of four walls for another set of four walls. Progression, of a sort.
When I think of the texture of those years, the grain of them, it’s not the silence that comes back first. It’s the paper. Paper was the primary medium. Paper and, on days of dizzying opulence, a pencil stub. The luck was always contingent, a variable as fickle as the wind that was denied me. The world outside my head was a set of severely limited propositions: the four walls, the carpet floor, the patch of yard where nothing grew because no one cared enough to bother raising grass. And inside my head, a desperate, fizzing need to make. To do.
I remember, with a clarity that embarrasses me now, a campaign of sheer, desperate will I waged against the fabric of reality. I believed, with the fierce, illogical conviction of a child who has never been taught the limits of the world, that if I wanted it badly enough, it would appear. I wanted a hand shovel. Not a toy, not a wish, but the actual, utilitarian, metal-and-plastic hand shovel I’d seen my father use once, plunging it into the earth with a satisfying, final thud. I sat on the floor, in a patch of weak sunlight, and I tried. I concentrated on the negative space in front of me, willing the molecules to knit themselves into that familiar shape. It felt like an eternity, a battle of attrition between my skull and the universe. Why a hand shovel? The question is stupid. You might as well ask a fish why water. It was the only tool I knew that promised a transaction: you put it in the ground, and the ground gives way. You create a hole. A hole is a change. A hole is proof of agency.
I didn’t get the shovel. The universe, it turned out, operated on a set of laws that did not include the bending of reality for a silent, forgotten child. But I felt lucky---a rush of such pure, salvific relief that I can still feel it in my fingertips---when I found a scrap of paper afterward. My expectations were so expertly curated, so perfectly reduced, that failure was the baseline and a scrap of paper was a windfall. I folded that paper into a crude shovel shape. I held it in my hand. And I was happy. Genuinely, chemically happy. Because I had two hands that worked. Because I had a brain that could conceive of the shovel, even if the universe refused to deliver it. My privilege was my own functionality. The bar was not on the floor; the bar was buried.
The innovation was slow, a kind of desperate archaeology of the domestic waste stream. My world expanded in increments of refuse. I discovered, with the awe of a cartographer mapping a new continent, that toilet paper and paper towels had a second life. They left behind ghosts, the stiff, cardboard cores, that my two hands and my brain could reanimate. I became a miser, a curator of the forgotten. I’d collect these treasures---a tube here, a scrap there---and hoard them in my secret place, thinking my hardest about what they could be. I couldn’t get scissors. I couldn’t get tape. The concept of glue was as distant as the concept of a parent who said something. I didn’t know that’s what was missing; I just knew my creations had a tendency to drift apart, to return to their constituent parts, as if they, too, understood their materials were on loan from the void.
Apr 1
Apr 1, 2026 at 9:38 PM UTC
I see it. A diamond, maybe, or one of those long-tailed dragons that would have eaten the wind. And I feel the old, familiar tautness in my chest, the string pulling against a sky that was never offered. I begged. I know I did. But the word “begged” implies a transaction, a resistance, a no that is a solid thing you can push against. My asking was more like a low, constant hum. A frequency. I would stand in the doorway of the garage while my father organized his tools; tools that had specific names and specific homes, tools that were treated with the reverence of icons---and I would say, “Can I have a kite?” He would not look up. The hum would continue. “A kite.” The clink of a wrench, the slide of a screwdriver into its felt-lined slot. “How can I make one?” There was never a “no.” A “no” would have been a thing, a solid object I could have held, examined, and understood. What I received was the absence of a yes. A void where an answer should have been. It’s a subtle thing, that void. You grow up thinking it’s the natural state of the atmosphere.
And then six years---six years, which is a geological era when you’re measuring it in the half-life of a hope---simply eroded. It was the entire syllabus of my existence, from the first lesson to the final, unceremonious exam. And the final exam was moving. A truck. Boxes. The sudden, shocking agency of adults who had been, until that point, statues. And I remember standing on the carpet floor of the living room---the one I’d spent so many afternoons lying on, tracing the grainy fiber with my fingernail---and thinking, "Ah. This is what it was all for. This moment of departure. This is the climax." It’s laughable now. The profound anti-climax. The move itself is a dry fact, a period at the end of a long, pointless sentence that should’ve been chapters full of running and shouting and the particular exhaustion that comes from a day spent being a child. The move was simply a change of four walls for another set of four walls. Progression, of a sort.
When I think of the texture of those years, the grain of them, it’s not the silence that comes back first. It’s the paper. Paper was the primary medium. Paper and, on days of dizzying opulence, a pencil stub. The luck was always contingent, a variable as fickle as the wind that was denied me. The world outside my head was a set of severely limited propositions: the four walls, the carpet floor, the patch of yard where nothing grew because no one cared enough to bother raising grass. And inside my head, a desperate, fizzing need to make. To do.
I remember, with a clarity that embarrasses me now, a campaign of sheer, desperate will I waged against the fabric of reality. I believed, with the fierce, illogical conviction of a child who has never been taught the limits of the world, that if I wanted it badly enough, it would appear. I wanted a hand shovel. Not a toy, not a wish, but the actual, utilitarian, metal-and-plastic hand shovel I’d seen my father use once, plunging it into the earth with a satisfying, final thud. I sat on the floor, in a patch of weak sunlight, and I tried. I concentrated on the negative space in front of me, willing the molecules to knit themselves into that familiar shape. It felt like an eternity, a battle of attrition between my skull and the universe. Why a hand shovel? The question is stupid. You might as well ask a fish why water. It was the only tool I knew that promised a transaction: you put it in the ground, and the ground gives way. You create a hole. A hole is a change. A hole is proof of agency.
I didn’t get the shovel. The universe, it turned out, operated on a set of laws that did not include the bending of reality for a silent, forgotten child. But I felt lucky---a rush of such pure, salvific relief that I can still feel it in my fingertips---when I found a scrap of paper afterward. My expectations were so expertly curated, so perfectly reduced, that failure was the baseline and a scrap of paper was a windfall. I folded that paper into a crude shovel shape. I held it in my hand. And I was happy. Genuinely, chemically happy. Because I had two hands that worked. Because I had a brain that could conceive of the shovel, even if the universe refused to deliver it. My privilege was my own functionality. The bar was not on the floor; the bar was buried.
The innovation was slow, a kind of desperate archaeology of the domestic waste stream. My world expanded in increments of refuse. I discovered, with the awe of a cartographer mapping a new continent, that toilet paper and paper towels had a second life. They left behind ghosts, the stiff, cardboard cores, that my two hands and my brain could reanimate. I became a miser, a curator of the forgotten. I’d collect these treasures---a tube here, a scrap there---and hoard them in my secret place, thinking my hardest about what they could be. I couldn’t get scissors. I couldn’t get tape. The concept of glue was as distant as the concept of a parent who said something. I didn’t know that’s what was missing; I just knew my creations had a tendency to drift apart, to return to their constituent parts, as if they, too, understood their materials were on loan from the void.
Testing my luck at putting longer stream of consciousness prose on here...
Request permission to use this poem