Please, Disregard

Unstoppable

SLAM POETRY 

We were unstoppable

A tree-house fort crammed with memories that our heads couldn't quite contain.
Lazy summer days, never memorable enough to warrant more than a feeling of nostalgia.

We ran through those woods, and we were warriors. Feathers in our hair and wild screams in our throats, we marked our faces with mud. Laughing at every imaginary foe, we kept away the evil with flushed smiles and smudged fingerprints, dancing in our makeshift warpaint. 

We raced through those woods and we were dragons. I, of course, was always the smaller. I growled and held my own, but deep down I knew if the eyes in the bushes made themselves into monsters, I'd have my big brother. He'd fight them off with his tree-branch sword, monsters once again becoming fireflies. We howled at the moon and clung to the steady oaks, begging not to go inside. 

 We walked through those woods and we were older now, sharing our hopes and dreams with the blue-bird sky and a tree house that didn't seem quite so big anymore. You were going to be a scientist, going to change the world. I settled on a humble writer, books and pages overflowing with vivid, vibrant words. You reviewed my stories and I listened to you speculate the atomic structure of every plank, every nail. We filled the air with our voices and the tiny tree-house with a new purpose. 

I never told you, but sometimes that tree-house felt so small I was sure it was suffocating me. 

We trudged through those woods and we were. . .different. You were not set on being a mathematician and my words had turned to acid. They still poured out like water escaping a dam but brought no one joy. We had watched our childhood disappear, one summer at a time, and we wanted it back! We went our separate ways at the end of those days, you to a mountain of homework and I to an overflow of exhaustion. 

You drag yourself to those woods one last time and you are crying. Home on semester break from Harvard, you came all this way to brush away leaves and dirt, revealing a headstone for the sister who can no longer walk through the woods with you.  You place a crisp college acceptance letter on her grave, to the literary college she always dreamed about. You tell her she should have held on longer, even if just to see the day she got in. She told you in her note that she was sorry, but who ever is, really? Then you set up your sleeping bag for one last night in this tree-house filled with ghosts. You are beneath the Tennessee stars for your finale because you know. Once you leave, you are never coming back to this haunted tree-house and its lonely ghost.