Swan Lake
I lay my head in my mother’s lap and ask her to braid my hair. She unravels the snarls, carefully picking apart the knots untangling the nest one piece at a time. My mother combs it all out, lays it flat across her thighs- long straight strands piled together, brings it to order. She weaves it together slowly, letting me feel the change, and when she speaks I remember bedtimes that swept her in on a cloud of chanel number five and deepened her voice to that of a storyteller- bedtimes that made me wish for bedtimes and the warmth away from wilderness. My little wildebeast, she says my wild one. She strokes my head and I close my eyes in pleasure. When she says it I remember my childhood burrowing into the lilac bush, prowling in a tunnel of dusk hued branches, the scratches on my arms like an animal that claws at itself to understand what’s inside the skin.
I don’t know when it was that I first started running What I know is that sometimes my heart flees first and I spend weeks searching for it in the jungle and that when I leave the swan lake behind, I don’t mind being tamed.
