My ashes are tossed amongst the fields of Valley Forge National Park.
I watch as the wind picks them up and they fly.
I watch them travel along the trails that I yearn to bike along one last time. I watch them mimic
the movements I did when I took the training wheels off my bike for the first time, ecstatic that
I could make it further than five feet now.
I watch them hit the wooden logs of the ancient cabins used in the Revolutionary War,
desperately trying to recall the feeling I felt the first time I saw the tour guide bring the tourists
into them.
I watch them crash into the stone plaques dedicated to old war heroes, wishing that I had a
chance to be immortalized among them with a rock of some sort. Maybe it would make me feel
like I would always be here. Like I mattered when I was here.
I watch them fly into the cornfields, the ones that my parents begged me to take pictures in,
where they insisted, I would never be "too old" for pictures. They were right. But I was
stubborn.
I watch them hit the cars that drive through the park. The same ones that I would name when I
saw them. Where I'd rush to say the make, model and year before my dad could beat me to the
punch.
I see a black Nissan Murano, made in 2009. I am sitting in the back, insisting that I am heavy
enough and old enough to sit in the front now. If only I could tell her that she is not, and that
she should remain in the backseat. For as long as possible.
She should not be eager to grow up. For I have, and still, at my old age, I find myself back where
I started. Realizing the irony in it all. How cruel of the world.
My ashes fall.
YOU ARE READING
paradoxical
Poetryyears worth of teenage and young adult angst transferred from a ratty old notebook to this app --for anyone who also feels like everything they do contradicts the personality that they desire to be perceived as
