Prompt 5

A.

I was my mother’s third. Third of seven. I came behind a character and an example. And the third time was not a charm for my mother. At one point, she says she shoved her nurse across the room for pressing on her stomach too hard. She was given a new drug, she said. She felt like she couldn’t find her control, she said. The third time, and yet so different. Unique circumstances, she said.

Fitting, too, because I was born a unique child. A girl with wild hair and a wild imagination. Different than the previous two… There was my brother, the goofball; born with his fist wrapped tightly around his geek flag. And my sister, the child-adult; who, like Athena, emerged fully grown and fully wise. And then there was me, a head-in-the-clouds child, chasing raindrops and talking to unicorns and laying on the carpet of my bedroom, arms outstretched, waiting for gravity to release, because I knew I was about to fly for the first time.

I have always understood this about myself. This unique, this dreamworld-y, this very different core that I own, that I keep glowing in my center. And, thanks to parents who declared my utter singularity in matter-of-fact tones lined with obvious affection, I was always secure in it. I loved it. I owned it.

But thirty years into life—in the middle of suburbia and motherhood and established adulthood—I wonder if others ever catch a glimpse of my singular core. I wonder if I am now, simply, not unlike every neighbor I greet on the sidewalk and every friend I chat with on the porch. And I think I am, now, simply one of them.

And I think now, thirty years into life, that because I am like everyone, everyone is like me. And this (despite what it looks like on the page here) is a hopeful thought. I begin to wonder if everyone is a raindrop-chaser and a dragon-hunter, a silver-blooded heart beater hoping to fly. I think they are. I think they live here, with me, in the middle of suburbia and parenthood and established adulthood, and share with me secret identities and curiosities. I am singular in a world of singularity. And I still look for the pale shimmer of unicorns when fog drops over the world.

B.

Herein lies the beauty—and the curse—of my same differences…. Or my different sameness (take your pick): My own rainbow-chasing story, like hers and his and theirs, is worthy of telling. I chase rainbows in my own particular way. And when I step into the woods and begin my dragon hunt, I am equipped with my own loyal sidekick, cynical minstrel and lurking villain. And it is their story too. And somehow… somehow…. I had better prove they are my own! I must own them wholly and completely and unabashedly. They cannot be Grimm’s or Andersen’s… or Bradbury’s or McCarthy’s or Valente’s.

And if my husband has come to hear my voice better than I hear it myself, then it is my own sidekick that weeps over my torn body at the end of the adventure, “but minimally, because your characters don’t over-emote in your writing.” And it is my own cynical minstrel that picks up bar wenches with charismatic pick-up lines “like ‘fancy’ and ‘tender’, because you couldn’t use a normal interjection, hon.” And it is my own lurking villain that springs the trap for me just before the story’s climax, “and let’s be honest, honey, he’d probably be wearing white instead of black, just to throw people off. And someone good will die. And your hero wouldn’t come out unscathed, because you don’t believe those heroes. And some things would be left unresolved. But you would never do a trilogy, honey, because you think…..”

And as these conversations almost always end in my home, my husband would say, “When are you just going to start?”